Do you want to generate qualified traffic for your website? Is it important to you to lay the right foundation for sustainable inbound marketing? Start with defining your personality and you are halfway there. Quality web content is the backbone of inbound marketing. And it is the strategic point of contact with your target customers…
However, we agree that it is impossible to deliver a relevant and convincing speech if you do not know who you are addressing. And it is the design of our target audience profiles that we are focusing on today.
You get it, we make up the personality.
Note, however, that there are many different types of personalities and that there are just as many methods for creating them.
What is a buyer persona/marketing personality?
Based on the principle that we need to know our audience in order to optimize our communication plan, individuals facilitate this process.
Persona is simply the ideal current or potential customer of a company envisioned by its marketers. He is a fictional character created by gathering information through field studies.
Personality is the marketing goal of your business.
Creating a persona with the greatest precision is important, even necessary, because this is what allows your company to have a good knowledge of its audience: individuals or companies in the case of B2B. This is all for the purpose of controlling the conversion lever of your segment.
1. Marketing Person
The marketing persona is the unique customer of your business. It is defined through demographic data (gender, age, location, etc.), media preferences used, purchase motivation, etc.
Its usefulness lies in measuring the viability of a product and defining the most attractive advertising messages of such a profile. In contrast, this classification shall not be used to designate a product or service or to define their functionality.
2. User Personality
Unlike hypothesis-based personality marketing, user persona relies on real people gathering concrete data. The information is retained as to the needs and objectives of consumers, also known as “pain points”, in order to optimize the product or service to best respond to them.
Note that “Design Person” or “UX Person” are two other common names for user persons.
The recipients of these two profiles in the company are clearly not the same. Sellers will use personality marketing to tailor their advertising messages. Designers, on the other hand, will rely on the user persona to visualize all the functionalities of the product or service.
Why is it absolutely necessary to define your personality?
The answer to this question is simple! Addressing one person at a time and getting to know the other person well improves the receptivity of your message, in this case advertising. Therefore, properly identifying goals is essential for the success of your marketing strategy and the creation of engaging content.
A HubSpot study revealed a very clear result. Email campaigns using individuals have 2x the open rate and 5x the click-through rate for those not using individuals.
Knowing who you’re talking to is also related to the difference between client profiles. Information collected from professional clients if we are in B2B or in the case of B2C.
The most frequent difference is that in B2B multiple decision makers will be involved in decision making in the same sales cycle.
How to define your personality?
Professionals divide the personality definition process into 4 major steps to follow:
1- List of Major Questions
Here are these types of questions to ask yourself:
- Who is your product and/or service intended for?
- Who are your current customers?
- What is the profile of the customers you want to win?
- Who are the disaffected customers of your product or service? This is the notion of anti-personality. It allows you to focus better.
- What is the profile of customers targeted by your competitors? This answer will make it easier for you to differentiate yourself in your situation.
This list, you guessed it, is not exhaustive.
Having a comprehensive list of the most relevant questions is a real brainstorming task that has to be done by the marketing team involving all employees. To best identify the profile of the ideal customer, each person will express themselves on information that is useful to them.
2. collection of data from target
Having obtained the most comprehensive list of possible questions, it will be necessary to look for answers. At this stage, marketers are responsible for retrieving as much data as possible from the target customers.
For this, there are different ways to combine:
- Take advantage of existing data: Many analytics are automatically available on your digital communication media. Whether it is on Google Analytics, Facebook Audience etc. You have a good number of easily exploitable socio-demographic and geographic data like gender, age, location etc.
- Interview your current customers! What is their buying inspiration? What are their criteria for selecting the products/services? And what are their problems, pain points, etc.?… This is your Ali Baba’s cave!
- Gather information about your prospects: If you are new to the highly competitive business sector, it is advisable to get in touch with your targets directly. How ? By doing market research on the ground. Otherwise, consider gathering your useful information by taking online questionnaires, organizing focus groups, or downloading an eBook, white paper or other lead magnet.
During the process of collecting data from your target, you should be careful to only keep data useful for your study.
On the contrary, it is counterproductive for:
- Recover as much data as possible and you drown in over-information;
- Pay attention to profiles that don’t suit your ideal customer.
3. Discuss with your colleagues
Isolated, marketers have little visibility on the reality of the market. Furthermore, creating a persona is not a responsibility reserved for the marketing department. To generate qualified leads, the entire company is mobilized and especially the employees are put in direct contact with the customers.
As an example, I would say that the marketer analyzes data to understand the behavior of prospects. Sales people know exactly what your prospects’ problems, questions and needs are.
The role of technical service is also very important as it is the one that controls the way you use your products.
In addition, hold one (or more) work meetings to bring them together, to get the profile of your ideal client, in consultation among all the stakeholders we just mentioned. It is wise to schedule the latter after the end of the data collection phase.
4. Formation of Personality
You’ve got all your data, now you have to group them! This is division.
The last step of this task is the simplest. All you have to do is compile all the information gathered and create your personality.
As a bonus, don’t hesitate to name your personality and give it a photo. It will help you a lot in visualization. However, this step remains optional.
Lastly, reserve a space in your file to write the message you want for your personality. Targeting your prospect’s feelings requires that your text be personal and relevant.
To end this article, I have some good advice for you: Make sure you avoid any bias when describing your personality. You run the risk of having an overly generic profile that only partially represents your target customers. To ensure that you are successful in building your personality, be open and attentive to the market.