Target personas. They’re not even real, but they can make a huge impact on your inbound marketing and sales strategy.
What is a Target Persona?
A target persona is a snapshot of who your audience is. It’s a semi-fictional representation of your audience. Most businesses have at least two or three target personas, if not a few more, that represent the decision-makers, decision influencers, and anyone else you’ll be marketing and selling your brand to.
Every part of your customer- or client-facing team should be aware of who they are and be able to provide insights when you’re developing or revisiting them on a regular basis.
Being able to answer this question is key to making sure your marketing team isn’t barking up the wrong tree and accidentally wasting their budget in the process. Depending on the type of business you’re running, you might even have a few different answers.
For example, suppose you’re a media company trying to sell ad spots to your customers. Your target persona could potentially be anything from local restaurants to funeral homes to doggie daycare services.
This is also where looking at your existing customers, and ideal customers can pay dividends. Once you know where they are, you can start developing some industry-specific content that engages your audience in that industry and establishes your brand as subject matter expert in their field.
Your target persona’s job title can tell you a lot about who’s making the final decisions and signing on the dotted line. Is the person the business owner? Perhaps they’re in the C-suite or have the term “Director” in their title. No matter what industry you’re catering to and which specific department you’re trying to reach, those titles most often belong to the decision-makers.
On the other hand, what if they’re a sales manager or a talent acquisition manager? If that’s the case, they might not be making the final decision, but these positions can hold a lot of sway within their department. Even more, they might be the person you regularly contact when you provide services to them.
Finding the answer to this might involve surveying your existing customers, sure. But another option is to ask for your contacts’ job titles on forms to determine some commonalities among them.
Inbound marketing is based on the idea of attracting your customers in a way that isn’t disruptive or intrusive. For the average customer and target persona, that typically means researching independently. Your job is to find out which tools they’re using in their research.
In the digital age, these tools can encompass anything from a simple Google search to their favorite industry-specific podcast or belonging to a group on LinkedIn so they can connect with their peers. Many industries still use trade shows and other events to facilitate these solutions as well.
But, before you go booking tickets to the next trade show on the other side of the country, do some research of your own. Surveys may have been helpful for the first two questions mentioned above, but here they’re especially helpful tools. Just because you know one of your long-time customers heard about you on a radio ad doesn’t mean every single one of them did—conducting surveys to learn where they first heard about your services will eliminate some of that confirmation bias.
Other than not being disruptive, inbound marketing also follows the theory that people “hire” different products and services to do a job they need to be done. Oftentimes, that means directly addressing a pain point in their business.
One common example that a lot of businesses can relate to is not being able to generate enough leads consistently. Another could be that nobody knows about their brand, and they aren’t sure where to start to increase brand awareness. Or, they might even have trouble attracting job candidates that will be a good fit for their company long-term.
Your job is to find out what these pain points are. It might seem as simple as looking at the problem your product or service is meant to solve. However, as the folks at V8 are well aware, there may be multiple jobs your product or service is doing to help your customers.
Your target personas might be concerned about seeing a return on their investment if you offer them a service. They could be looking to increase their employee retention or satisfaction rates. There could be any number of goals they’re trying to reach, so it pays to know what those are and how they might vary between each of your personas.
Whether you’re using customer surveys or doing your own research in your target industry, knowing how to answer these questions will help you better understand how they think, the content that will engage them the most, and how to close more deals with your target personas, regardless of their industry. Use them to gather the necessary information and form your target personas around those answers.
Lastly, since I’ve hinted at it a few times by now: Don’t be afraid to survey your existing customers, in addition to gathering your information through forms and your own research. They can provide a wealth of insights and answers for all of these questions and more.