Marry your TG! Ok, well, not all of them. But at least get to know them well? Like REALLY well! ;)
Getting a good understanding of your target audience before you launch your brand is critical. It also seems obvious when I put it this way. But as consultants helping small businesses scale, we’ve seen that super passionate founders sometimes make the mistake of assuming that if a product is good (read: great formulation, pretty packaging, liked by their friends & family), it will be successful from the get-go.
But wait. Before you launch a product or a service, ask yourself these 3 questions. Who are you really aiming to reach with this product? What problem of theirs are you trying to solve? Are you trying to gain a share of mind/wallet from some competitors or building a new category?
We’ve seen that getting a clear understanding of customer personas or buyer personas helps founders and their teams and agencies define communication and ad targeting gos & no-gos better. What are customer personas? Let’s dive straight in!
A customer persona is a summarized representation of your audience primarily based on their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral traits. Note that a customer persona isn’t a direct representation of one of your customers / potential customers, but a fictional representation of a group of customers.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how one can go about this:
1. On-board customers - Source the right kind of customers that fit into one broad category (eg, if launching a women’s brand, narrow your customer group to women) but are representative of the entire population (eg, women across age groups, cities, professions - you get the drill). Be it through an unbiased survey or detailed conversations, try speaking to as many people as possible.
2. Ask the right questions - First, be clear about the end objective. Whether it is figuring out your communication style, advertising targeting, or a go-to-market for a new product or category, be clear and design the questionnaire accordingly. It’s ok to deviate from the questionnaire when you’re having a consumer chat and want to understand a certain behaviour better. Feel free to tweak your questionnaire for future conversations, once you’ve spoken to a couple of people.
3. Record conversations - Make notes of key insights and patterns that emerge as you speak to more and more people.
4. Analyse - Spend a good chunk of time going through your recordings and notes to summarize and analyze key learnings, similarities, and differences between the different consumer groups that start forming.
5. Build your personas - Give an easy-to-understand, fitting name to the personas you finalize. Add all the findings from point 4. And voila!
Here’s an example of one of the personas we worked out for a home decor brand we worked with. The goal here was to identify the go-to-market for the next scale-up phase of the brand.
P.S. It is important to note that all the personas you identify via this exercise, are not necessarily your target audience. How do you identify which ones to go after and which to reject? And what are all the things you can do after you’ve locked your target personas?
Stay tuned for the next blog to learn more. Or of course, we love ourselves some consumer chats. It’s the #1 thing we do in most of our engagements. if you want us to take this up for you, you know where to reach us
(Psst: we’re at meet@thebuildinc.com)
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