Getting To Know Your Customer

Importance of Knowing Your Customer

  • Commandment in inbound marketing: Know Your Customer.

Example: Apple iPhone 3G in Japan

  • Launch in 2008 resulted in low sales of 200,000 phones.
  • Japan had over 50,000,000 cell phone users.
  • Key reason: Lack of understanding of customer needs.
    • Japanese customers valued video recording capabilities, which the iPhone 3G lacked.

Buyer Personas

  • Definition: A buyer persona is a fictional generalized representation of your ideal customer.
  • Purpose: Help businesses understand their customers and tailor content effectively.
  • Benefits:
    • Easier to meet specific needs, behaviors, and concerns.
    • Helps answer essential questions about customers' backgrounds, goals, challenges, interests, and needs.
    • Facilitates personalization in marketing strategies.

Components of Buyer Personas

  1. Demographic Insights
    • Characteristics like age, gender expression, income, family life, hobbies, etc.
  2. Buying Insights
    • Decisions and evaluations during purchasing:
      • Priorities
      • Measures of success
      • Barriers to overcome
      • Evaluation criteria for options
      • Influences on purchasing decisions
    • Source: "Buyer Persona" by Adele Vardella
    • Insights can reveal:
      • Buyer receptiveness.
      • Relevant aspects of solutions.
      • Attitudinal barriers.
      • Evaluative resources.
      • Decision-maker roles and influence.
Example Persona: HR Hannah
  • Role: HR Manager focusing on recruitment, retention, and process efficiency.
  • Challenges: Limited resources, budget constraints, and managerial support issues.
  • Demographics:
    • Age: 30-50 years old.
    • Salary: $90,000-$130,000.
    • Experience: 6+ years.
    • Urban resident.
  • Personality Traits:
    • Easygoing, information-seeking, and innovative.
    • Busy with responsibilities leading to late-night work sessions.
    • Values quality hires and understands associated costs of poor recruitment.
    • Engages in professional development through online resources and values flexibility in services.

Negative Personas

  • Definition: Represent individuals not suitable for business offerings.
  • Importance: Helps filter unfit customers, allowing focus on marketing and sales efforts.

Creating Buyer Personas

  • Quantity: Aim for minimal distinct personas, focusing on similarities based on buying insights rather than demographics.
  • Take note: Similar expectations facilitate tailored content and messaging.
  • Engage in active listening to understand buyer stories, leading to ideal customer profiles.

Process of Creating Buyer Personas

Customer Stories
  • Importance of customer feedback and narratives in shaping personas.
Integration across Business
  • Adopting a customer-first approach enhances overall business strategy.
Quote by Harold Janine
  • "You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start by the end, and then do everything you must to read it."

Researching Buyer Personas

Goals of Investigation
  • Aim: Gain in-depth understanding of buyer's demographics, definitions of success, reasons for investment, barriers, and decision influencers.
Methods of Gathering Insights
  1. Surveys
    • Predefined questions yielding quick information.
    • Validate existing insights.
  2. Forms
    • Capture demographic and basic company information.
  3. Sales Team Feedback
    • Insights from customer interactions help identify customer types.
  4. Social Media Engagement
    • Monitoring discussions on platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
  5. Interviews
    • Target both customers and non-customers to gather additional insights.
    • Categories:
      • Current customers.
      • Competitors' customers who chose not to purchase.
      • Individuals who skipped considering your product.
Tips for Effective Interviews
  1. Who to Interview
    • Engage customers, competitors’ customers, potential customers, and uninvolved individuals.
    • Preferably avoid speaking to leads who are in the buying process:
      • Notify sales teams about interview requests.
  2. Motivating Response
    • Email or phone calls offering candid feedback on evaluation, clearly stating no sales agenda.
    • Offer incentives (e.g., gift cards) for participation.
    • Flexibility in scheduling interviews.
  3. Conducting Interviews
    • Aim for 20-30 minutes.
    • Maintain a neutral interviewer presence (not involved in sales).
    • Prepare by researching interviewee backgrounds via LinkedIn or other means.
    • Focus on extracting insights related to demographics, investment reasons, and decision-making processes.

Post-Interview Process

  • Analyze notes to extract key insights and identify patterns.
  • Use patterns to create buyer personas with tools like HubSpot's MakeMyPersona.

Presenting Findings

  • Share persona findings with all company team members to ensure alignment.
  • Utilize meeting presentations and follow-up emails for reinforcement.

Applications of Buyer Personas

  1. Ad Spend Reallocation
    • Focus on where customers engage online to optimize resource allocation.
  2. List Segmentation
    • Tailor communication based on predefined buyer personas.
  3. Dynamic Content Optimization
    • Personalize web pages and messaging to engage personas.
  4. Targeted Content Creation
    • Develop relevant blogs and content addressing buyer persona challenges.

Conclusion

  • Accurate buyer personas lead to a customer-first company mentality, aligning marketing, sales, and services towards a unified goal.