What’s going on in the mind of your ideal customer? If only you knew, creating a marketing strategy would be much easier. Personas can help you get close to this understanding. A persona is a fictional profile of your ideal customer, based on interviews you conduct with your existing target audience or the target audience you have in mind. Often, you have a diverse target audience, and you can create a persona for each segment. This way, you can better understand who is in your target audience, what matters to them, and what motivates them. This makes creating a successful marketing strategy just a bit easier. To help you get started, we have prepared a questionnaire and some tips to keep in mind while developing a persona.
Tip 1: Contact the right people
We’ll provide you with the questionnaire, but you also need people to interview. Start by creating a list of people who fit your desired target audience(s). These can be existing customers or prospective customers, as long as they align with your ideal customer profile. Also, think carefully about whom you need within a company. The CEO or CFO often gives the approval for a decision but is usually not the person looking for a service provider. This could be a marketing employee, back-office manager, or assistant. Consider how this would work within your target audience: how did you connect with your current customers? How does it work in your own company?
Then you can start reaching out to the right people. Do this in an approachable manner, making it clear that you’re not selling anything but rather asking for a favor. A bit of flattery can help here. LinkedIn is a suitable platform for sending out some messages.
Tip 2: Always ask follow-up questions
Our questionnaire is a good starting point, but the truly relevant information comes from conversations. So use the questions mainly as a starting point and ask follow-up questions to really get to the heart of the matter. The details provide the information you need to ensure that your content truly fits your specific target audience. Of course, you can also supplement the questionnaire with questions that are relevant to you. The more specific, the better.
Tip 3: Create a clear and tangible persona
Once you have gathered all the information with the above questionnaire, you need to combine it into one persona per target audience (segment). Pay attention to similarities between answers, notable differences, and potential reasons for those differences. Once you have distilled the information into manageable insights, you can create a persona. There are various templates available for this, but you can also create your own. To make a persona truly tangible, it helps to give it a name and add a (stock) photo. This makes it easier to envision the persona as an ideal customer and keep them in mind when developing your marketing strategy and content.
Now that we’ve set you on the right path, there’s only one thing left to do: download our questionnaire and discover who your ideal customers really are!
