Once you’ve had a look at your competitors, the next step is to start understanding your customers and what really makes them tick. If you missed my last post about how to analyse competitors, check out this post first.
One of my favourite ways to do this is by developing out customer personas, also sometimes called avatars. I’d usually recommend starting with three core personas to begin with. A customer persona is a fantastic tool for really starting to think like your customer.
As business owners and even senior marketers, we often forget that it’s not about us – it’s actually about our customer. So spending some time on your customer personas is vital to ensuring you have a really robust strategy and that you’re really targeting everything at the right people.
You can have fun with your customer personas as well – don’t be afraid to make it personal! Give them names, give them an age, give them a backstory. For example, do they have kids? Are they married? Where do they live? What’s their house like?
You can even include information that you might initially think is irrelevant because it can tell you a lot about your target audience. I’d always recommend including things like their motivations, or in other words, what really drives them? Are they motivated by money? Are they motivated by discounts? Are they motivated by status and prestige? These are things that will all really help as you look into how you’re going to position your product and service and brand to your customers.
Finally, don’t forget the fun bits that make them real people! By that I mean things like: what do they like to do for fun at the weekend? What do they do with their families? What is their favourite kind of food?
The sky really is the limit when developing customer personas and you can have a lot of fun delving into what their concerns are, what their worries are, what their fears are and also what they love and what they look for in a brand.
To find out how to create the rest of your marketing strategy for your small business, you can watch my video ‘What is a marketing strategy’:
And don’t forget, if you want to see the bigger picture, focus on the things that really matter to your customers and communicate with them effectively to get the results you need, get in touch to arrange a free 30-minute chat.
