Who is willing to pay money for my product or service? Isn’t that the question that we all want answered? If playing my favorite board game (Candy Land of course) has taught me anything, it is that you cannot skip steps if you want to make it to the sweet ice cream king’s castle. Taking a complete stranger, and converting them to someone buying from your company works very much the same way. Determining who your ideal customer is, and equally important who is not, is a huge step in the right direction. We are here to help you get to that point.
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Candy Land Buyer Persona Steps
Let’s put this into perspective from our company standpoint. As a web design firm that focuses on marketing and SEO, we know that we cannot just design things to look pretty. They must serve a purpose. Everything we do for our clients is focused on achieving their goals. In design that means creating a logical layout of content that really speaks to our clients’ customers. With SEO that means establishing who is using certain keywords, and also asking “Do those keywords associate with the business personas our clients want to be doing business with?”
It’s Definition Time
Buyer persona: A fictional representation of who your generalized ideal customer. We have seen company’s go as far as to answer all the questions you would expect to answer when creating a social media or online dating profile.
Negative personas: A buyer persona that represents someone you would not want as a client. These reasons are stripped down to what makes business sense. For example someone who might have unreasonable time frame expectations, or not enough budget to afford your company might have traits that your want to avoid.
The information you need to establish these roles can be gained through many different avenues. Examples include industry research, experience, surveys and interviews.
Make sure that as your gather this information you are addressing these essential talking points:
- Background: Sum your past, present and potential clients up in a business setting.
- Job, title, career path, education, family life - Demographic: All the usual but necessary terms come to mind.
- Age, gender, income level, location, interest - Identifiers: Here is where things get interesting and intuition comes into play. This is where you establish buying habits, processes and expectations. At The Lightwurx we have noticed that our very best clients, those being defined as “someone who we can create win/win scenarios with” have common traits and processes. If you are going to convert your target audience you must speak their language and follow their social norms.
- Process, company structure, communication preferences, demeanor, values - Goals: On a philosophical level most people buy when they are looking for a problem to be solved. This is true for all of us. “I am hungry” go buy some food, “I want entertainment” go to a movie. When you strip it down, almost all buying occurs when a problem needs to be solved, so let’s move our Candy Land piece one more colored square and figure out what problem we can solve.
- Identify problem, situation, what can your company do to help - Challenges: Every project or client is going to have some sort of challenge in the way. This could be budgetary issues, time frames constraints, or maybe your client is just not as available for communication as you would like. Regardless it is essential to determine these possible challenges so there are no surprises along the way.
- What will it take to address these challenges, can my company meet these challenges, and is this even a good fit for us? - Client Quotes: Many times in very subtle ways, people will tell or show you what they need to see or hear in order to be sold. Write down what your past, present and future clients have said. For example, one of our very favorite client’s told us “if you guys work hard, you have a customer for life.” He further went on to explain that when he hires new employees for the first week he has them maintain the company property by mowing the lawn and pulling weeds. Sort of an old-school way of weeding out the lazy employees. We made sure to note it because it showed us that if we can prove to our client how hard we can bust our rumps, we can make everyone happy.
And there you have it. We wholeheartedly believe that nothing should ever be considered as “done.” However these talking points are a must address for you to be able to determine just who you want to do business with and who you want to avoid.
Did we miss something, do you have anything to add, tell us your story below.
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