PERSONA IDENTIFICATION AND MARKET RESEARCH

Who are your buyer personas? Why are they important? What role do they actually play in your playing field? Would it be so bad not to have any, and what do they really help with?

To put it plainly, your buyer personas are your ideal customers. In order for you to be able to identify who you want to be selling to and for what price, you need to understand the people you want to entice to purchase your service or product. 

Knowing your customer is everything in marketing. If you have a good idea about who it is you are selling to, you can sell them anything. That being said, it’s important to note that you need to have an analytical approach when determining what will work and for whom. It’s great to have hunches, but when you are entering a new market, no matter how much entrepreneurial experience you have, it will always be difficult for you at the start.

There is one universal truth - your customer is the one who should determine your effort, pricing, offer, pitch, graphic and communications language, approach, and even product in itself. If you don’t know your ideal customer, you will not be able to start testing efficiently. Here is what you need to mind when setting up your ideal customer personas: 

1. Interests: What are they interested in? What moves and drives them? Note down 1 to 3 main interests that have something to do with your brand and proposition. Make sure that these are your “core” product features as well, so if you need to do some inner work and figure out what precisely the USP of your product is, go ahead and do that beforehand.
2. Secondary and tertiary interests: Name 1-2 secondary and 1-2 tertiary interests that accompany the main ones. If you are a coach and are catering to ladies in their 30s and 40s who are looking to put themselves first, then secondary interests could be these paint and wine sessions that have been all the rage recently. A tertiary interest could be self-help books, webinars, or events. Jot down the names of some important brands in those niches - here is your ad target niche.
3. Location: Is your business online or do you want to sell locally? Are you a brick-and-mortar, or do you want to work globally? Make sure you define your target area before you start with your personas. Now, take that into consideration, and add the countries they should be from. Think about two aspects: engagement vs. paying customers. There is another segmentation from that. If you, again, are a coach and are offering your services globally, you may get a lot of engagement from Germany and France, but they may not be paying customers because your asking price is better appropriate for your US market. Make sure you don’t target “easy” countries. 
4. Demographics: Age, gender, marital status, education (if applicable), make sure you clear all these out before you set off with your ads or market research. 

Now take this data and put it into an Excel sheet. Work these profiles against Google Trends or frequently asked questions on there. Compare your hypothesis with the market and start targeting or developing a product.

It’s essential to compare and adjust as needed, as you are building a supposed ideal network. In reality, you almost never hit the nail right on the head, so it’s important to compare with aggregated numbers and statistics and make sure you are in the golden middle.

Contact us if you have any more questions about this: hello@pozi.io