Knowing who your customer is-and who your customer isn’t-is the key to focusing your marketing efforts and growing your small business. Whether it’s brick and mortar or online and digital you won’t be successful without a full understanding of who that customer is.
In this episode we talk about what that means, what you need to know, and ways to use that information to be successful.
Don’t waste time and money targeting the wrong customer, it’s time to grow.
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Show Notes:
If you’re having trouble finding customer background data for your area, look up the voting demographics. Typically you can see the demographics by voting region in your state which may be a smaller area.
Demographics can include:
-
- Age
- Gender
- Educational level (if applicable)
- Shopping interests (depending on products/services)
- Geographic location
- Ethnicity
- Interests
- Religion
- Marital status
- Children, if so how many
- Income level
- Communication Preferences
We recommend creating a simple customer feedback survey to collect information about your current customers. There are many free or inexpensive resources to create online surveys. One easy to use site is Survey Monkey, where we created this quick example in about 10 minutes:
Create your own user feedback survey
Why would you need multiple Customer Personas?
Depending on your business, you may want to have two Customer Personas, so that you can target your advertising to both. For example, a Martial Arts Studio would have 2 very different customers.
Customer Persona 1: The Parent
This customer wants:
- An extracurricular activity for their kids
- Improve their kids’ confidence
- Feel like they are preparing their kids for the world (teaching respect, discipline, etc)
Customer Persona 2: The Child
This customer wants:
- Something to do (bored), a challenge perhaps
- A sport to compete in
- It’s cool to do Martial Arts, they’ve seen it in movies and on tv
Those are two very different audiences with vastly different goals, so this is a solid reason to create multiple personas. You will need to plan out your marketing efforts to be able to reach both, as they don’t necessarily react to the same message or even method of advertising. For example, if you were to advertise on social media you would reach the Parent on Facebook and focus on goals and showing good value for the money, perhaps offer promotions or discounts on those ads, as well.
But yet, for the child/student, you won’t find them on Facebook. You would create ads to reach them on Instagram or TikTok. This gives you the opportunity to create a specific message targeting the prospective student – highlight their needs with images and videos of other kids competing, doing some amazing moves, and looking confident while doing it. Also make sure the students can create their own content, so don’t ban phones during class, allow them to use them to share “cool stuff they do in class” and make sure they mention the school or any tags you use.
Very different audiences that will be reached differently with different goals are the real reasons we create multiple customer personas.
Homework:
Write down who you think your ideal customer is. Include details that are relevant to your business. Try to answer these questions:
Who is your customer?
Where do they live?
What are their shopping habits?
Why do you think they entered your store/visited your website today?
If you need help, we are available for consulting services. Montenero Studios wants to help you succeed.