Nowadays, getting to know your customers is the starting point for marketing. It is not as simple as asking them what they like or dislike and how you can assist them. It’s critical to learn their ways, which genuinely requires planning.
Customer personas come into play. As the name implies, a customer persona is integral to determining what makes your customer tick.
Before creating a customer persona, you must first identify your ideal customer. Consider this: if you could make the ideal customer, who would it be? What are their challenges, and how can your brand help them overcome them?
You might wonder why identifying your ideal client is critical when developing a customer persona. Isn’t revenue just revenue?
The critical point is that this data allows you to optimize your marketing efforts to those who generate the highest revenue and have the highest lifetime customer value.
What is the customer persona?
The approach of focusing on the Job-to-Be-Done differs from the approach that many businesses take to understanding their customers and delivering products and services.
The traditional and still widely used approach is to understand customers through the lenses of demographics, segments, market economics, personal attributes, and product attributes.
The application of this conventional lens frequently entails gathering some data points (typically, customer attributes) that are correlated to provide an understanding of the customer. For example, after conducting research for a milkshake shop, you discover that your customers are mostly male, employed, own a car, and use the drive-through in the morning to get a small milkshake.
Customer personas provide insight into what your potential customers are thinking and doing as they consider possible solutions to the problem they want to solve.
Buyer personas are effective in marketing strategies for 83% of B2-B marketers.
Jobs-to-Be-Done will teach you how to:
- Recognizing the need you fill for your customer
- Identifying segments with distinct unmet needs
- Sharing your knowledge of needs throughout your organisation
- Creating new successful products or services
- Developing more effective marketing strategies
- Developing New Business Models
What do customer personas teach you? Data about your customer and the future.
- Quantitative data: information about your customers that can be calculated, measured, and counted.
- Qualitative data: subjective information gleaned from customer interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic research.
This is where the concept of Jobs-to-Be-Done comes into play. JTBD focuses on a person’s needs and their behaviour. It also addresses why someone does something. You can only begin to think creatively and effectively about how your organisation can help them once you understand the need, why they have it, and why they want to solve it.
Read: 5 Ways to Enhance Customer Experience in E-commerce
How to know Customer Personas
Determine your customers’ needs and expectations
Research, not intuition, should determine what your customers require. Whether you are developing an MVP or running a multimillion-dollar business, this is true. Creating the right solution for your buyer is much easier when you know who they are.
Recognize purchasing decisions
What influences your customers’ purchasing decisions? Is it more important to consider the price than the brand? Do they place more emphasis on product design or specifications? A buyer persona can help you make and target these decisions more effectively.
Learn more about the behaviour of your target users
Where do they get their information? Do they prefer newspapers, TV, or a newsfeed on their phone? Such insights will assist you in reaching your potential customer through the appropriate media.
Limit the scope of your advertising campaign
Your advertising probably tries to reach as many people as possible, but this is an entirely incorrect strategy. The multiple people you target, the more money you’ll have to pay, and the less effective your campaign will be. Knowing your buyer persona entails only targeting specific groups of people who are more likely to purchase your product. As a result, efficiency improves, and advertising costs fall.
Target marketing
Marketing with the wrong targeting is both expensive and inefficient, similar to advertising. You can, however, segment your marketing campaign based on multiple buyer personas and target each with tailored offers, emails, and blog posts.
Obtain higher-quality leads
Improve the quality of your leads by narrowing your ad and marketing targeting. Have you ever had to talk to someone who came to your website but didn’t understand what you were offering? The overall number of leads will decrease with proper targeting, but their quality will increase.
Make objective decisions about rebranding
Yes, this is what Gap erred. Even if you like the colour pink, you probably won’t use it as your primary colour if you know your customers are men between the ages of 45 and 60. The buyer persona concept is based on the idea that you must satisfy your customer, not yourself.
Use A/B testing to your advantage
When planning an A/B test, choose more qualitative variables to test with real customers. Knowing who you need to target allows you to conduct more efficient A/B testing.
Outperform your rivals
The development of buyer personas will provide you with a thorough understanding of the market and the customer. This is a significant advantage over competitors who continue to rely on intuition when developing offers, advertising, and other content.
Data from social media
Social media channels enable you to learn about your target audience’s interests, preferences, and problems. Twitter Analytics, for example, provides information about your followers’ engagement, such as which posts they like and comment on, which they ignore, and when they are most active.
Facebook Audience Insights is likely the most comprehensive service for learning more about your target audience. You can know everything people usually share on Facebook: your subscribers’ education and relationship status, the devices they use to access Facebook, the languages they speak, the other pages they follow, the topics they engage with, and so on.
Interviews and Questionnaires
Sometimes the information extracted from your CRM, social media accounts, and Google Analytics is insufficient to create a detailed buyer persona. Why not simply ask your current or potential customers if you require specific information about them?
Questionnaires are an excellent way to ask questions without having to talk to people in person. Send the questionnaire link to your subscribers, share it on your Facebook page, offer a discount or a coupon to those who respond, and – presto! – you have detailed information about your customers’ preferences and needs in your pocket! Make good use of it.
Read: How to Make Money from Your Website
Conclusion
Persona creation and validation are both critical. They form a combined activity that clarifies who is using your product or service and what they are attempting to achieve.
Buyer personas are extremely important and cannot be replaced. When the buyer persona is removed from the equation, you are left with a JTBD that will lead you to a rational and cold analysis. At the same time, without jobs, you risk losing sight of the main goal of your product. As a result, combining both methods may be the best option.
However, don’t stop with the product. You can begin to consider distribution and go-to-market strategies through the Jobs-to-Be-Done lens. It has the potential to alter your messaging, marketing channels, and overall strategy.
Finally, once you have this information, the most difficult part is often prioritising the Jobs-to-Be-Done. You realise your product solves a wide range of issues.
