“Buyer persona” and “client persona” are terms that frequent nearly every marketing guide, course, and insight you can find, and that’s because knowing your customers is crucial for any business’s success. How well do you know your customers and potential customers?
The importance of a strong client persona is true for By Aries, and it’s true for all of our clients, as well. We tend to assume that this universal truth is widely known and applied by everyone in order to define and redefine their business goals throughout the years; however, we see that there is a range in understanding and application of client personas that varies with each of our clients, and the strength of our clients’ customer personas is immediately evident when we run online engagement metrics for our clients and potential clients…
Why is that?
Because a deep understanding of your target client equates to a deep impact on your bottom line. So, let’s get a good grasp on what that client persona is, what it does, and how to build it.
A buyer persona is the complex outline of your ideal client, and it’s built upon real data that can be sourced from many places, including you (we’ll get to that). These outlines of your ideal client are not just fun descriptors of your business’s audience, but think of it as a checklist that will inform your messaging, branding, and service offering decisions that all equate to a bigger bottom line for you.
But before you can get to that increased bottom line from having garnered the attention from high-value prospects and relevant leads through engaging conversion and retention, you have to build that outline. So, how do you do that? Let’s take a look at 3 ways to construct a dynamic and comprehensive view of your ideal clients.
- Audits
- Analytics
- Automation
Audits, analytics, and automation! Oh, my!
Don’t worry, your pathway to seeing the emerald green won’t be nearly as convoluted as Dorothy’s journey on the Yellow Brick Road. But, like Dorothy, you have everything you need within you for success – you just need to realize it. So, let’s break it down.
Client Audits
This one isn’t rocket science. You have to ask questions to get answers, and the answers you need are from your existing clients and prospective clients. An audit of a client’s pain points, perceived needs, demographics, and other personal aspects will give you a deeper and stronger understanding of who it is you need to reach and how to do it.
Scheduling a free consultation call with prospective clients and coming prepared with inquiries that identify your prospective client will not only facilitate the process of getting that coveted information you need, but it demonstrates your awareness and care for that prospective client. Clients want to know their opinions and needs really matter to you. These types of audits show them just that.
In that same line of thinking, your existing clients want to know you still care and are still there for them is a great way to reconnect with existing clients and show them you understand their evolving needs. Check in with them for a quick conversation, and come prepared with those questions in your back pocket to make sure you understand their brand, how they’re doing, and how you can best serve them.
Analytics
It seems like everywhere you turn on every platform imaginable there are links to analytics and insights to see. You hop onto a new website, and you’re asked to approve those cookies so the company can track who you are, where you’ve been, and what you want. Why? So they can tailor their messaging and decisions to best serve you. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be a mega-corp to get that same insight into your prospective clients.
Google. Facebook. MailChimp. LinkedIn. Instagram. Twitter. Your website. What do those all have in common, besides all being online platforms your clients and prospective clients frequent? They all offer the analytics you need to better build a client persona. The importance of analytics for building best practices in your business is even a global industry. There are businesses devoted solely to sifting through all the data out there and compiling it for you to use, and you can certainly do the leg work on your own.
Using analytics to paint a better picture of your clients and prospective clients is a great supplement to client interviews, and it can also stand alone. Some practices have very discrete clients and prospective clients who are not so eager to serve up their deepest pain points, but not even the most secretive clients out there can hide from data mining, and that is how you strike it rich< proverbially and literally if you use that data well enough.
Automation
Everything we do is intuitive now. We get coupons for items we need on the receipts from stores we frequent. Our inboxes are filled with “we think you’d really like xyz…” emails. Targeted ads on our social timelines seemingly have an insider view to our deepest thoughts and desires. How!? Automation.
Remember how we mentioned that everything we do online is tracked? That also plays into automation, but in a less secretive way. Buyer experience surveys are the end of anof a an online shopping excursion, giveaways for giving up a little info about yourself and what you need, and chatbots that pop up to greet you and offer assistance are both prevalent and effective tools to better understand your client.
Big names like Lego have put to use a very helpful and user-friendly tool to help their clients find the perfect gift, and it also automatically feeds Lego the raw data that is the very foundation for knowing their customers, and big brands like Walmart are even using automatic facial recognition to determine who their customers are and what makes them tick. Wild, right!?
You don’t have to go full Minority Report to gain that type of automatic information, though. Include links in your automatic email campaigns so you can track the recipients interest. Send out surveys. Create opt-ins. All of this allows you to sit back and collect that valuable information in an unobtrusive, yet effective, way.
Knowing your customers and understanding your customer needs is an attainable feat that is crucial to any marketing strategy, and keeping your finger on the pulse of your customer satisfaction is key for retaining long-term relationships with current clients and customers. Instead of taking a shot in the dark and crossing your fingers you got it right on those client personas, take the steps and time to utilize data-driven and real approaches to creating detailed persona profiles for more strategic and effective marketing practices, and that’s easy as 1, 2, 3: audits, analytics, and automation.
Still fuzzy on why you need strong client personas and how to build those? Give your favorite digital marketing gurus a call, and we’d be happy to help you perfect your digital presence!
