For many people, the holiday season represents a time of change. Some folks have made the decision throughout the year to start a new business in 2018, and the festive season’s message is one of hope for a bright new entrepreneurial future. Unfortunately, for most, this dream can become a nightmare without considerable amounts of planning on part of the entrepreneur and start-up founder.
So, without sounding too depressing, Christmas and New Year’s should be a time for stringent planning rather than celebration for the season and the year ahead. Call me Ebenezer Scrooge, but hitting the laptop and doing research is the best thing an entrepreneur can do while family and friends are unwrapping gifts or holiday-making.
As a business owner who has used the month of January as a starting block for my foray into a new industry, I can say that one of the problems I encountered was not accurately defining my customer personas, both in real-time and online. It got me thinking; if I can make the mistake when it comes to accurately segmenting customers in real-time, how many people make the mistake of inaccurately creating customer personas for their online brands?
It’s All About the Customer
Creating a customer persona is easy. Most business founders have an idea of who their customer is before marketing their product. And once you know who the customer is, its just as easy to find out their likes and dislikes, as well as their habits.
The best way to create customer personas is to base your personas on research and data. Many established businesses find this a simple task, as they have a wealth of clients from which to draw this data. Unfortunately, this is not the case for business founders, so they must carefully test the waters using surveys, third-party research, and an ear-to-the-ground within the industry.
Once a business understands its various buyer personas, it’s time to start considering the typical online buyer persona…
Characteristics Mapping
Just because you can accurately determine your optimal customer due to your created customer personas, you may have to create alternative personas for online consumers. This is because a slightly different person will be looking for your product online.
As an example, Bob owns a pool business, building as well as maintaining pools for residential clients across Johannesburg. Bob’s nominal customer persona is that of Adam, the 40-something business owner who owns a home in a middle-class neighbourhood. Adam is likely to come across Bob’s out-of-home marketing material, or comes to Bob for business through referrals. However, Adam differs from Lerato. Lerato is a different age, race and gender. Even more importantly, Lerato looks for products and services exclusively online. To appeal to Lerato over Adam, Bob’s customer persona must be changed for the online customer, and the online customer must be exposed to tailored content to be appealed to.
Lerato also lives in a middle-class neighbourhood, but Lerato has young children, while Adam’s children have now moved out of home. This means that Bob can take advantage of Lerato’s need for pool safety nets and a custom-built pool fences, and Bob will make sure that Lerato is exposed to content about these services while making her online journey.
Content Mapping
When creating online material, ensure that it is developed to take advantage of the online customer. One mistake that business owners make is that, in their attempts to be recognised as industry leaders, they try very hard to use industry specific language. They make attempts toward showing their prowess in the trade and showcase their own certification and business journey.
The online customer persona representing the business’s primary online buyer does not care about the business’s goals and objectives, and they have no clue as to what is being said when the website uses online lingo. They want content created for them; they want to know why they need the product or service, they want to know that they are using the best business for the job, and they want social proof regarding the service offered.
Make sure that you do proper content mapping research, and identify the online journey taken by the consumer through online channels before they make a purchasing decision.
Take this a step further and make sure that you define several online customer personas. Determine the value of each persona and structure content and the consumer journey for the most profitable of the personas. Additionally, determine the lifecycle of the journey, how much attention a segment of online content generates, and capitalise accordingly. For example, if most of the purchasing decision is made on the product or service landing page, make sure that the landing page is optimised as often as possible to increase your business’s revenue.
Starting Blocks
Hit January 2018 running, and make sure you understand your online client before receiving your first online lead. And if you make a few mistakes initially, don’t worry. 2017 was – and 2018 will be – known for being the year of big data, where business owners make operations and marketing decisions based on the behaviour of customers online. Always analyse the data available to your business when made available, and make changes accordingly. The best of luck for the year ahead!