Building a company, department, division or even a personal brand is tough. Not only do you have to put in a tremendous amount of work to get it off the ground, you also need to look after your customers, go to market effectively, make all the right promises, differentiate yourself, and, of course, make a profit!
In this 7-part blog series, we’ll break down some of the elements that go into scaling a psychometric service.
It’s time to talk about target customers. In part 2 of our blog series, we'll discuss the people you’re aiming to provide value to.
Before we begin, let's look at some useful definitions:
The two are used interchangeably by some, but it is useful to understand their differences especially when first defining what they are for your company.
And on that note, let's begin.
Describing the ideal companies that we want to sell to helps determine our choice of language, our brand's tone of voice, and the topics and references in the stories we tell.
When defining ideal customer companies, make sure to consider things like industry, size, structure, products and stakeholders. Try to be as specific as possible with your ideal customer – it’ll help you have far more meaningful conversations.
If, for example, your ideal customers are small businesses in the west of England, your blog and its focus will be far different from the way it would be written if your ideal customer was a global FTSE 100 company - also your LinkedIn profile, case studies and testimonials!
If your product is a psychometric tool that solves problems for internal recruiters wading through high-volumes of applicants, you’ll probably not be channeling your marketing towards SMEs. Be clear, be specific.
The persona is a semi-fictional character that embodies the behaviours and characteristics displayed by many of our company’s target audience (the people who will buy our product/service). Typically, we would expect to work with 2-3 personas.
Defining a buyer persona enables us to specifically target our approach towards; it gives us somebody whose problems we can truly solve: somebody to give our advice to, somebody we can help, and somebody we can focus our marketing towards. The buyer persona often has frustrations, issues and challenges that lead them to you and your services.
Take the time to fully consider what position our buyer persona has within their company, if they possess any decision-making authority , what their interests are, what challenges they face and what motivates them. Try to fully understand the real challenges and problems your buyer persona has before you think about solving them.
For some people reading this blog post who are involved in start-up or small businesses, running a buyer persona workshop might be a small affair, either on your own, or with another colleague or co-founder. For others, it may be a larger workshop with more team members. Regardless of the size of your organisation, it’s an incredibly worthwhile exercise to undertake.
Have a look through the structure of the workshop below to see how
you can run your own buyer persona session:
Attendees:
Ideal buyer persona workshop attendees would be taken from the following list (aim for as many people as you can)
A. Senior Customer Facing People (directors, account managers, sales, customer success team)
B. Marketing/Product Owners
C. Support/Service/Presales
D. Customer Onboarding
E. Senior people with deep understanding of the market
A buyer persona is a description of the person that you believe your customer is andwhat they’re like. The purpose of the persona workshop is to understand the interests,frustrations, concerns and challenges of these people - it is not to focus on your company message to them.
The workshop should take around a half working day, to ensure that everything is covered.
Use a flip chart for your workshop to make it easy to capture notes and look back over them. For the sake of efficiency, ensure to only write up notes of those things you agree on, rather than everything that is discussed. You’re trying to capture consensus, not a transcript of the day!
Just to be sure you don’t miss anything,you could record the workshop on a smartphone Memo App.
Write up your report.
The purpose of the report is to summarise the workshop findings. We have listed a structure to which you can follow when writing up your report
A. Write out your ideal customer
B. Explain the buying centre you work with
C. List your triggers
D. Describe each persona’s traits on one page. Add a photo and pin it up on the wall of your office
E. List all the ideas you’ve had for content pieces and add them to your content calendar
Ask your customers for feedback.
Find a prospect and a customer you think matches your persona and ask them to look at your website.
Ask your contacts to provide you with honest answers and feedback to the following
questions:
• Are you clear on what we do?
• Does it sound like us when we write on our website?
• What is the most useful part of our website for you?
• What’s the one clear message you take away from our website?
• What is missing, and if you could wave a magic wand, what would you have us add?