Step 1 - Audience Research
Define customer segments and develop personas
Understanding your audience and customers is the key to success with all marketing efforts.
Without this intelligence, you are marketing in with a blindfold on. Or, worse still, you are trying to be everything to everybody and in turn, become nothing to anyone.
Many businesses have more than one audience segment, that is totally fine, but each must still be well defined so we can communicate clearly and create entrance points and user journeys.
Without this approach you will never get visitors to engage and connect.
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It is not all about you
When planning a website, it can be all too easy to think about what you want. What are your goals? What you have to remember is that the most successful websites help your visitors achieve their goals. Google helps you find the information they need for free. In exchange, they get to show you ads (lots and lots of ads).
Audience segments help us understand the wants, needs, and pains of our target audience. We can then ensure we are focused on serving their needs, simplifying their lives, and helping them achieve their goals.
The trick is to then align this with your products and services so the business goals are attained by helping your prospective customers.
Win-win.
1.1. Customer Exercises
Here are a few simple questions to help you identify your best customers.
1. Who are your best customers?
a. Most profitable
b. Good to work with
c. Least hassle
2. Who are your worst customers?
a. Eat up lots of time
b. Not profitable
c. Not enjoyable to work with
1.2. Customer Segments
We want to create a simple list of desirable customer segments so you can focus your website and marketing efforts where they will have the best possible impact.
We are looking for customers that are a great fit, pay well, appreciate what you do and you enjoy working with – just imagine how much better things could be if your entire customer base was these people? Let’s aim at it!
1.3. Persona Template
Next step, for each of your ideal customer templates, flesh them out into the persona below. Also; please, please, please don’t feel like you need more than one; one is good, one is better!
Summary
By now, you should have a firm idea of the kind of people you want to target. These should be people who you can serve well, who value your business so will pay you well, and who will appreciate and be happy with the work you do for them.
You will now take this understanding forward when you come to set the goals for the website so you can ensure the site serves your ideal audience whilst progressing your business mission.
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