How to create personas for small business

Have you ever walked into a shopping center, with all the different kiosks and stores selling their various wares, and immediately felt lost? Have you gone into one of those stores only to realize nothing there interests you at all?

This is the challenge customer’s face when stepping into the shopping center that is the Internet. You know what products and services you offer, you know who would be interested in coming into your store and browsing around. How you target and attract those specific customers is a vital component to your marketing strategy.

How you create content for these customers is a key component to your success. The first step is to understand the concept of personas.

1. What Is a Persona?

A persona is the fictional, broad stroke, version of your very real customer. Personas begin as concepts of whom you need viewing your site and purchasing your services/products. Not all people are completely alike; however, they all bring overlapping needs and expectations. If there is one thing customers can all agree on, it’s that they do not like to be let down. A persona encompasses your customer’s shared paint points and allows you to focus on marketing towards your business’s ability to resolve them. A fully fledged persona takes these shared needs and expectations from concept to reality, creating a tangible audience you can tailor your site and its content for.

Key elements of a Persona

1. Your persona should be built into the core of your visible space, whether that is a website or store front. Every link, page and graphic should speak to your persona. If something is not appealing to the customer’s you need for your business, who is it for? Many sites and marketing strategies can become bloated as they attempt to reach too wide of an audience. Unless you sell one of every product or service imaginable, there is no need to attract every customer type.
2. Stick with your business, what you excel at. A persona itself can be broad if needed and you want to avoid being too specific with your target audience, but maintain a consistent message across all marketing platforms: “This is what I do and I do it best”.
3. Having a solid persona applies an incredibly efficient level to your marketing. Your sales team knows the type of customer they need. Your engineers know the type of website flow your customers want. Your designers know the type of graphics and interactions your customers find attractive. From top to bottom and in all aspects of your business, with a proper persona, you can ensure every visible action your company makes is perceivable and enticing to the customers you need to succeed.

2. How To Research a Persona

A persona is only as strong as the research in which it is built upon. You can’t expect to sell anything to a customer that you do not know or understand.

Ask questions, a lot of questions

The first step in researching your persona is to simply ask your customers the big questions:

1. Role. What is it that your customers do on day-to-day basis? What is asked of them by their customers, their colleagues or even their boss? Don’t shy away from specifics and heavy details. Find out their job title, their role and even the way in which their work is measured. What skills are needed to perform their job and what knowledge, tools and training is required to be successful. Knowing the details of how your customers function in their jobs gives incredible insight to their needs and wants.
2. Goals. Your customers have a measure of their own success, they have goals and you need to find out what they are. What makes them sit back and smile, knowing they have done well? Their specific will refine your idea of what a customer wants at the end of the day.
3. Challenges. Everyone has roadblocks. What gets in the way of your customers success? To that end, how do you customers overcome those obstacles? What are they not getting that the need to be truly successful?
4. Watering Holes. Do your customers read the paper, blogs or frequent social media? How do they learn about new information? Do they seek it out specifically or just stumble upon it. Knowing how active your customers are in social networks helps paint a more detailed picture of what attracts them.
5. Personal Background. Some information is easy to overlook, but not knowing where your customers sit in key demographics leaves you with an incomplete persona. What is your customer’s age, family structure and educational levels? This information assists greatly in narrowing the idea of your preferred customer.
6. Shopping Preferences. How do your customers like to buy their products and services? Do they prefer phone sales, website/email interactions? Is meeting with a vendor in person their true choice? Knowing how your customers want to interact with you is critical. Dig even deeper though and find out how they find vendors in the first place. Are they running strictly off referrals or do they research on their own using internet searches? The method in which your customers discover the places they like to shop at will assist in ensuring you are meeting their expectations.

Collect data through your website

Be efficient with your website, make it work for you. When creating forms ensure the fields capture key information from your customers. Asking the size of all your customer’s companies can give you a cross section of the demand your customers require. Finding out what preferred social networks they use, and determining which of those is used most by all your customers can ensure you are focusing your marketing towards the networks your customers actually use.

3. How To Build a Persona

Now that you have the data needed to understand the overlapping wants, needs and pain points of your customers you can begin to analyze it and build a persona.

1. Pick a marketing tool. Personas are an integral part of Inbound Marketing. Choosing the right Inbound Marketing source is important. One of the most efficient and effective tools for doing so is HubSpot. Using HubSpot you can quickly create a contact for each customer. You can easily enter in all the data you have collected and expand on that using the Search on Google feature. HubSpot contacts can then be searched through and categorized.
2. Use your sales team. Don’t forget who is spending the most time with your customers. While your website may provide good information, your sales team has great ability to provide details regarding trending they see. Always be on the lookout for ways to add more information about your current customers as well as any prospective customers. This ensures your persona actually matches the customers you are marketing for.
3. Focus on trending. Repeated needs, paint points and preferences should be more and more visible across your contacts, giving way to the generalized information that composes what your persona is.

4. Writing For a Persona

You are now ready to tailor your content towards a real audience comprised of what your customer base needs and expects. Some key ideas to keep in mind:

1. Write on their terms. Everything your customer reads should be in a language they not only understand but engages them. Your customer’s should feel comfortable with the way you speak to them and not feel lost in technological jargon or terms that, while making perfect sense to you, are unnecessary for their jobs. If your persona is complete and detailed with information from your current customers then you should have the data needed to know how detailed your communication should be. Take it a step further though and keep your style in line with what your persona would want. Colors, fonts and even formatting are crucial to how stimulating your text is to the right audience.
2. Focus on your persona’s pain points. It is easy to get wrapped up in what your business can do for a customer, but don’t lose sight of how your business can elevate pain points. People search out services and products to resolve an issue they are having, they seek out ways to overcome inconvenient or inefficient processes. Through the building of your persona you will know what pain points affect your customers the most. Ensuring your website, blogs and emails contain details about how you can assist with these issues goes a long way to bringing in new customers and continuing to delight the ones you have.
3. Search Engine Optimization. You want to constantly attract new customers, the right customers. Ensuring your content is appropriately filled with keywords, matching the wants, needs and pain points of you persona, you can be sure that a search on Google will bring someone to your site. Tools within HubSpot assist greatly by allowing you to enter your keywords and having it search your content giving you an indication of how much of an impact you will make.

Inbound Marketing Strategy

The act of converting attracted visitors into customers and continuing to impress your existing clients is an incredibly successful strategy. Personas are the first step this process and a critical aspect to have mastered before moving through the rest of the process. Performing all the tasks required can be time consuming though. Outsourcing your marketing can help handle a lot of the work required.

Create your personas by downloading the Buyer Personas Guide & Template

Image courtesy of Nicolas Nova under CC 2.0

Originally published at www.growthlabs.marketing.