Ideal Customer Profiles Done the RIGHT Way

Written by Alla Elfimova | Nov 3, 2021 10:01:27 PM

Ideal customer profile (or buyer persona profile, when also reflecting on behavioral characteristics of the customer) is a guide to your target customer. It illustrates what segments of prospecting clients you should be going after, their demographics and attitudes such as their pain points, challenges they face and how they navigate through the purchase journey. So how to build your ideal customer profiles / buyer personas the right way?

Taking time to think about your customers (both, existing and prospecting) and researching the category and market insights is a necessary step in building your buyer personas. During this exercise you could identify segments or groups of customers that share some common attributes.

Once you crafted the persona profiles, make sure all sides of your organization are informed. Your personas are crucial to nearly every business strategy decision you make: creative, customer acquisition and retention, sales strategies. Customer profiles will inform your marketing plans: knowing what your customer challenges are will help better address their needs, define the right positioning and serve relevant messaging to them.

The good news is, we've developed a Buyer Persona / ICP template for you to use. Feel free to download it here.

Where to start?

Step 1

Good ICP / Buyer persona profile is based on the real data, not guesswork. That’s why the very first thing you should do is to extract the meaningful insights about the customers from your 1^st party data:

Web Analytics (Google Analytics, Omniture): pay attention to how different audience segments engaged with the content and where they drop-off
CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot)
Lead generation forms: understand what prospects say about themselves
Data from LeadFeeder and similar services will provide insight into what companies visit your website (including sessions that didn’t result in conversion)

Step 2

Next, get information about leads from the sales team. This will help you understand what their pain points are, the product features your customers like the most and what the buying process looks like.

Step 3

Customer service team could provide further insights into types of customers that have the most success with your product or service, customers common complaints, as well give you characteristics of the customers that are more likely to churn.

Persona Magic: Your Guide to Ideal Customer Creation

Learn the art of creating perfect customer profiles with our practical guide.

Download Now

Step 4

Build your personas. Aggregate all the information you collected in the first three steps. Do you see any behavior patterns? Can you identify common attributes? Analyze the information to build an encompassing profile (remember, there could be more than one). Avoid stuffing your profiles with unnecessary, vague information and focus on identifying their distinct attributes instead. To help you in this process, we created a list of questions you could use (download the template here) to make sure you’re fully describing your personas.

Step 5

By this step you should have a clear understanding of who your ideal and non-ideal customer is. Start using ICPs in your sales and marketing strategies to drive engagement and increase conversion rates.

Optimize your paid media targeting strategy, by segmenting the audiences to match your ICPs
Tailor the messaging to each audience segment. You know what resonates most with them, what these audiences prioritize when shopping for your product or service. Illustrate how your product / service is solving for their pain points. Improving relevancy of your messaging goes a long way!
Build personalized automated email marketing campaigns
Optimize content on the website to make sure your hitting on the most important points for your target audience. Customer path to purchase is not linear. Create friction less experience for your customers, by crafting copy that meets their needs at every step of the journey.

Reach out to us if you'd like to speak to a marketing specialist and see how Transcend Digital can help your business grow with the marketing strategy that drives incremental ROI.

View full post