Personas: Tame them to consolidate them better

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The Inbound sales and marketing approach has marked a complete turnaround from the traditional ideology of reaching customers.

One of the most important steps in making the transition to Inbound marketing is to ensure that our personas correspond to the target we really want to reach. Indeed, since Inbound puts the customer experience at its heart, it's vital to understand our target audience: what they want, what motivates them, what problem they're looking to solve with our product or service, and so on.

To help you in the process of creating personas, there are a few basic principles to consider:

1. Understand what a persona is

A persona is a fictitious, generalized representation of your ideal customer. To define a persona, we suggest interviewing potential, current and lost customers. The aim of these interviews or surveys is to bring together the common denominators of people who buy or are interested in your product or service. That said, it's quite rare for companies to have just one persona. So you could end up with two, five or even twenty personas. If you only identify one at the outset, due to a lack of time or resources, it's always possible to add more over time. It's better to start with just one of several possible fictitious customer representations, than to stop yourself from starting interviews for fear of omitting any at the first iteration.

2. Create negative personas

In contrast to the personas described above, you'll also want to make sure you create negative personas. As their name suggests, they represent the opposite of the typical customer profile you want to address and interact with. They could be hard-to-please customers in your industry, students looking for your product with no real intention of buying, or prospects too costly to acquire in relation to the potential revenue generated. It's perfectly normal not to be able to serve everyone, and it would be utopian to think you can. Not only could this divert you from the customers and prospects you can really win over, but if you do convert some anti-personas, they could waste an enormous amount of time and money, being virtually impossible to satisfy in the long term. Although it's sometimes hard to say no, it's best to do it early in the process. Although it may seem counterproductive at first, doing so will save you time and money in the long run.

3. How to use personas

By now, you'll have understood that personas give you all the tools you need to better target your marketing efforts. For example, rather than sending the same e-mail to your entire database, you can decide to send a message tailored to certain people, based on the information you have about them. This extra level of personalization could help you convert certain individuals over the long term, as well as getting to the heart of their concerns. This will prevent them from seeing your e-mail as SPAM, and the recipient will place more value and credibility on your brand. What's more, by taking the time to weed out the wrong prospects by creating negative personas, you'll increase your chances of converting the right ones, and lower your cost per acquisition in the process.

By adapting your message to the life cycle your prospect is in, you'll be able to create hyper-relevant content that's likely to surprise your target in a positive way. As a result, over time, your interactions with them will become increasingly enriching and valuable. Once he's ready to buy, he'll have every possible reason to think of you first.

4. How to create personas

As mentioned above, creating personas inevitably involves surveying your target audience. These may be prospects, existing customers, or people outside your database, but who fall within the parameters you set at the outset.

There are several ways of doing this:

1. Conduct interviews; whether over the phone, in person, or via videoconference, the important thing is to ask questions that will help you understand what people like (or dislike) about your product or service.
2. Review your database. You'll be able to identify the common denominators that link some of your contacts. You'll learn more about them by understanding how they consume and find your content.
3. Build forms that capture the information that's important to you. If, for example, your offer varies according to the number of employees in a company, don't hesitate to make this field mandatory in the form. If it's more the job title of your prospects that's important to you, again make sure you make room for this field.

5. Consult your sales and support team

Although this tip may seem counter-intuitive, I assure you it's worth its weight in gold. Marketing tasks have long been relegated to the marketing team, and rightly so. They are the marketing specialists, after all. That said, it's sales reps who are on the front line with prospects. They'll know what questions they have about your offering, or what common problems they're trying to solve with your solution. Existing customers, on the other hand, are more likely to be in contact with your after-sales support. They'll be able to provide you with a profile of your current customers.

And that's it! Now you know a little more about creating personas. If you'd like to know more, please don't hesitate to contact me.