Have you ever sat down and created a description of your ideal customer or persona? I recently took some Inbound Marketing University classes from Hubspot. I was extremely impressed when they showed us an example of their ideal persona for a particular product they were promoting. It was detailed down to the income bracket. I admit although I have made a generic description of my ideal clients, I had never gotten detailed about it.
The logic behind this task is overwhelming practically and a bit obvious. How to do you attract people if you don’t know who they are? It is like aiming for a target with a blindfold on. Once you have created the persona then you aim your efforts in marketing toward that description. Of course, you can do business with people outside that description but it helps to define your marketing efforts.
The questions you would need to ask yourself when establishing your ideal persona will be different from market to market and industry to industry. I was recently talking to a publisher client about their persona and we came up with some questions like these.
Who is your ideal persona or target customer?
- Do they need to write for a specific genre if so which one?
- Is your target male or female or both?
- What income bracket do they need to be in?
- How many books have they published?
- What is their technological ability?
- Do they have an agent?
- Are they open to new media marketing?
- What is the age bracket?
- What is their publishing budget?
This is just to give you a few examples. You also can have more than one target persona. Back to my publishing client ,they are also interested in targeting retailers. Therefore ,we also worked on a persona for the retailers they want to attract. Sometimes all your marketing can be rolled into one site with an emphasis on two different target if it is logical to combine them, but sometimes it may mean you need two totally different strategies. Unless you determine your target or targets you won’t know how to aim. Clarifying your target will also help you evaluate your analytic to see how well you are doing against who you are aiming for and allow you to make strategic tweaks to your campaigns as you go along.
Come on show me some comment love and tell me have you created a written description of your ideal client and how has it helped you with your marketing efforts. Anything else we need to consider when look at the ideal persona?
photo by cliff1066
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Great insight into this often-seen forboding topic. I found the subject overwhelming to address until I read your blog. It’s time to push past what I like or think looks good for our website and focus on who is really going to be buying books from us. I’m working on the description now and doing some research from national sources to fine-tune my ideal customer. Thanks for the inspiration to move further with this.