Finding and Speaking to Your Ideal Customer

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Finding your ideal customer is crucial to business success. Once you create that buyer persona, the rest pretty much falls into place. It becomes easier to build a strong brand, target your social media efforts and create other types of targeted content.

An easy way to understand the power of a buyer persona is to compare a small table of people at lunch to a stadium with thousands of spectators. Which group do you think is easier to sell to?

Define Your Brand From Your Customer’s Point of View

The biggest mistake you can make is to build your customer base around how you want your company to be perceived.

Instead, ask yourself, what benefits do your company offer to your ideal customer? How can it solve their pain points? Then ask yourself, who does this really speak to?

That’s why the most effective way to gauge your audience in an unbiased manner is by taking a data-driven approach.

Take the NFL, for example. Historically, football has been considered a male sport. It seems to make sense for the NFL to focus on a male audience. Right?

Wrong. In 2010, the NFL learned that women make up close to 40 percent of all football fans. So they re-targeted by creating more modern, sophisticated apparel (read: not just pink jerseys) and women responded. In 2014, Super Bowl XLVIII was the most-watched television event among women.

Creating a Buyer Persona

Now it’s time to put together everything you’ve come up with so far. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer.

Creating a great buyer persona requires:

  • Data
  • Insight
  • Understanding your customer
  • Understanding your company
  • A little imagination

It takes some work, but in the long-term personas will allow you to tailor your content, services and brand to meet the specific needs, concerns and behaviors of your potential customers.

Once you have an idea of the group you want to target, it’s time to analyze them. Are they more likely to be male or female? Are they younger or older? Are they from the East Coast or West Coast? Do they download apps? How educated are they? Some of these may seem trivial, but they’ve been proven to affect what a customer expects out of his experience.

From there, create a succinct elevator pitch that addresses all of those, and explains how your company can help.

Keep persona in age when building content. This will help you decide whether to spend more time on Instagram or Facebook, whether your emails should be more informational or witty, and whether you need more videos or testimonials on your webpage.

According to Hubspot research, using personas made websites between two and five times more effective to use.

Speak Directly to the Customer

You’ve done the research and compiled a perfect buyer persona, you have an elevator pitch that could sell ice to an Eskimo. Now what?

It’s time to put that work to good use by creating targeted content. By tailoring your content to your specific audience, you are able to concentrate your efforts and optimize your resources.

Skytap, a self-service cloud automation company, launched a tailored content marketing strategy and saw a 210 percent increase in North American traffic and that targeted personas brought in 124 percent more sales leads.

In a marketing world that revolves around social media, email marketing, and user experience, customers expect more than a generalized sales pitch.

Seamless is a great example of the powerful ads that you can create when you know your audience. In 2015 they launched a New York City subway campaign that uses witty one-liners and NYC generalizations to create effective, memorable ads.

They know their audience is the busy millennial, and they speak to that with adages such as “Cooking is so Jersey” and “Avoid Cooking like you Avoid Times Square.”

Who’s your Audience?

Finding the right audience isn’t necessarily easy, but it pays off in the long run. Luckily, experts and business owners have developed a bit of a process to help you along:

  • Define your company from the outside-looking-in.
  • Collect as much data and research as you can find about your audience.
  • Compile the information into a buyer persona that examines demographics, behavioral patterns and translates them into an elevator pitch.

Only then are you ready to sell.

Marketing Resolutions for Your Business (and Yourself)

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It was once again mid-December, and I was once again sitting and trying to come up with a list of resolutions. While going through some of the most common resolutions: get healthy, do more for others, etc. it hit me: these are great marketing resolutions, too.

Resolutions are a great concept. They give you focus for the year and motivate you to get more done. So often our work lives overlap with our personal lives—wouldn’t it be easier to just make one set of resolutions?

Resolution #1: Lose Weight and Get in Shape

This is everyone’s perennial favorite, and for good reason: when you’re in shape, you feel at your best. It’s the same for your business. One of your marketing resolutions should be to lose dead weight and make healthier business choices.

This year, instead of indulging in every marketing tactic out there, concentrate on the ones that will strengthen your business. Does your accounting business need a Pinterest? Probably not. Do you need to 

Instead of sending out quick emails and posts that get you through the day, work on campaigns that will carry you into the future.

Resolution # 2: Think About Others

Long gone are the days where a simple HTML website was enough to impress a client.

These days, it’s all about user experience. Consumers have grown to expect a lot from companies. User experience is no longer just about how your website performs, but how it looks, as well as how well it’s optimized for mobile.

Instead of choosing website elements based off of your personal preferences or keeping certain elements because they’ve been there since day one, think of your customer. 88 percent of online consumers are less likely to revisit your site after a bad experience.

How do you prevent that? By focusing on the little things as well as the overall experience. A user experience manager for Bing credited using a specific shade of blue for at least $80 million in additional annual revenue.

You can also just listen to your audience. Have they been asking for a search bar? A better way to contact you? Give them what they want—the customer is [almost] always right. ESPN saw their revenue jump 35 percent after incorporating customer feedback in their homepage redesign.

Resolution #3: Learn from Your Mistakes and Make Better Choices

In 2016, stop sending out tweets that get no engagement. Stop sending emails that are never opened. Stop writing blogs that are never read. Start learning from your mistakes.

Marketing is a vast and complex business. What works for one company might not work for another. A very easy and practical way to figure out what works for your business is to start A/B testing.

A/B testing in its most basic form is simple: make different versions (such as a version A and a version B) and see which one does better. It’s a near-universal practice that works on social media strategy, email blasts, landing page copy—pretty much all types of content.

By A/B testing, you’ll be able to actively compare conversion and engagement rates and use that data to figure out what resonates best with your audience. A/B testing helped ComScore increase lead generation by 69 percent, and it helped Sony increase purchases by 20 percent.

Resolution #4: Write More

In 2015, businesses (both B2B and B2C) that prioritized blogging were 13 times as likely to see a positive return on investment. Don’t miss out on a statistic like that. This year, one of your marketing resolutions should be to make time to write. 

Even if you’re not a writer, you should write more. Setting aside a just a few minutes a day to get your thoughts down on paper is not only therapeutic, it’s a great way to brainstorm, organize your thoughts and come up with the next big idea for your company.

What will your marketing resolutions be?

It’s never too late to set goals for yourself or for your company. This year, try to:

  • Optimize your web, social and physical presence to make an impact. Don’t cheat yourself out of quality leads by spreading yourself too thin.
  • Revamp your website. If you’re unsure how, follow this simple philosophy: Keep it simple. Make it easy to use. Make a great first impression.
  • Decide what works for you. Create variations and analyze data to figure out the best voice, language, and even colors for your brand.
  • Make time to write. Whether you write for your blog or for yourself, your business will benefit from a little spark of creativity.