If you’ve ever launched and promoted a website, this story might sound familiar…
You start out full of hope and with great ideas. You’ve read all the right books, joined all the right courses, talked to all the right people. In short, you’ve done all the right things. A few months in, you’ve got plenty of traffic on your website, but conversions are low.
Sure, a lot of people visit your website. But for some reason, your website traffic isn’t translating into leads and sales.
So, why is this happening?
Right product, wrong audience
If you’re attracting people, but they’re not converting – they might just be the wrong people. If this is the case, all your hard work will fall flat. No matter how much traffic you get, it will always be an uphill battle – like selling honey to bees.
In our experience, this is the right time to go back to square one. Ask yourself – “Who is my target customer and how can I reach them?” If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, you’ll end up reaching the wrong people.
You’ve got to really hit the bullseye when it comes to narrowing down your niche. It’s not just about the customers you could attract – but about the customers you want to attract. In fact, let’s ditch the plural. Think about your marketing strategy as if you were targeting only one specific person – your dream customer.
But who is this dream customer? And how on Earth are you supposed to find them?
Who is your dream customer?
Time to get creative. The first step to finding your dream customer is creating a customer persona.
A customer persona is a representation of your company’s ideal customer. Of course, this representation is purely fictional – we’re not telling you to track down your best customer and hire them as a one-man focus group.
However, fictional doesn’t mean inaccurate. Your customer persona should be based on real data and in-depth market research about your target audience. This means that your persona needs to be built out of the main qualities of your target audience – their goals, their challenges, their professional qualifications, their locations, their ambitions.
But why is creating a customer persona so important?
With one ideal customer to base your marketing strategy around, you can be laser focused on attracting and converting the right people. And what better way to understand that one ideal customer than by creating a persona who embodies their needs and interests? On top of that, having a customer persona will help you understand your customers’ mindset by identifying their specific challenges and pain points.
How can this help? Two words – segmented marketing. In a nutshell, segmented marketing means breaking down your prospective customers into smaller groups, or even individual people, depending on their behaviour. That way, you can develop and market your products and services as if you were targeting your specific customer persona.
Developing an accurate customer persona for your business can be tricky. However, if you follow this tried-and-tested formula, you’ve got a fantastic starting point…
How to create your customer persona
Defining your customer persona isn’t an easy task. It takes a lot of research to come up with an accurate representation of your dream customer. Fortunately, this lengthy task can be broken down into several manageable processes. Here’s our four-step process to creating an accurate customer persona…
1. Thorough research
By thorough research, we mean data-based demographic evidence of who your dream customer is.
How can you get your hands on that data? The answer is audience analytics. By compiling demographic information about your audience through tools such as Google Analytics and your CMS, you’ll significantly narrow down your niche.
2. Segmentation
Done with the first step? Now it’s time for segmentation.
A popular term in marketing, segmentation refers to the different sections of your target market that share the same characteristics. You can think of this step as your chance to organise all the data you’ve compiled in the research phase.
There are many different ways you can segment your audience – by age, by gender, by occupation, etc. By segmenting your audience, it’ll be easier for you to discover the most striking similarities between them.
Most importantly, segmentation allows you to create more than one customer persona. This is particularly important for businesses that offer more than one service or product. Let’s say, for example, your hotel offers special deals for honeymooners and for families. The target customers for each would be wildly different from each other, right? Then, it follows that your customer persona for each should also be different.
3. Goals, motivations and challenges
Goals, motivations and challenges are the three factors you need to consider in order to take your customer persona from fiction to reality. You’ll only be able to fully flesh out your different personae by understanding their dreams and motivations. “What makes them tick? What doesn’t?” These questions are crucial.
Let’s start with their goal. They want to book a family holiday.
What is the motivation? To relax and unwind? Spend quality time with loved ones? Have fun and excitement?
And what are the challenges? It could be budget. Perhaps they don’t have the time to organise everything. They could desperately need a hotel that offers kids’ clubs.
What you decide upon at every point will change your approach completely. A budget-friendly hotel with kids’ clubs will provide a very different customer journey compared to a premium hotel that offers joint experiences for all the family.
Once you understand who you want to attract – as well as their goals, motivations and challenges – you can tailor your products and services accordingly. You can speak their language. Solve their problems. Make their dreams come true.
Reaching your target customers
When you finally have all the details of your dream customer in mind, this truly opens out your options.
Why not work with an SEO expert to uncover the keyphrases your target customers are using to search for products and services online? Once you know what they’re on the lookout for, you’ll find it easier to use content marketing to reach them, build strong connections, and convert them into loyal customers. Plus, you’ll also be able to tailor your PPC advertising campaigns to your target customers using these keyphrases.
Understanding who your target customer is opens so many doors!
To learn more about how our services can help you reach your target customer, contact our experienced team today.