Knowing who buys is essential for businesses that want to build winning marketing strategies regardless of what their market or product is, even off the internet.
In this article you will find everything you need to know about persona, ideal customer and target audience. In addition to finding out if it is really necessary for your business to have the 3 defined.
In marketing, the persona is a tool used to design a character that represents the ideal customer, their desires and needs and thus serve as a basis for defining the strategy, choice of channel, type of communication and even the creative design style.
In operating businesses, this character should be as close to the ideal customer as possible, so it is drawn from interviews with real customers, research on social networks and groups, and mapping their feelings and needs.
In this way, all digital communication becomes more strategic and online advertising campaigns can make communication more assertive, reducing the cost of capturing leads and acquiring new customers. In addition to connecting with the public through their pains and desires, bringing a creative with design and offers aimed at the persona.
Early-stage businesses can imagine their personas. Therefore, create one or two personas but be attentive to the validation of the results by closely monitoring the performance indicators and, if necessary, discard personas that do not present good results.
Within the data collected related to the persona are: Name, Hobbies, Age, Habits, Challenges, Desires, Habits, Influence, Lifestyle among others.
A persona for an electrical supply store would be constructed as follows:
The number of personas is linked to your campaign objective, budget size and your customer's purchase journey.
As a rule, we start with at least 2, and the more personas the greater the complexity of the campaign, the greater the cost and especially a more advanced campaign maturity level as it involves more creatives, more content to be created, more tests and more indicators of performance.
It is a common mistake to want to over-segment the campaign with several personas and end up diluting the allocated budget and taking a longer time for validation and maturation of the indicators, harming the results.
The target audience is a demographic, socio-economic cut of the persona and serves to identify the size of this group of people on social networks and the volume of actions such as active searches in search networks.
They are a group of people who have characteristics in common, have the same education, social class, live in the same region and, depending on their product/service, have the same gender.
That is, habits, tastes, lifestyle or other peculiarities that are not linked to characteristics of people who want your product or service are not taken into account here.
In the target audience, broader, less segmented data are worked on, such as:
Region, Position (mainly for B2B), Education, interests, age group, Purchasing power.
An example of a target audience for the same electrical supply store would be:
Education or occupation: architecture.
Age: 25 to 55 years.
Gender: men and women.
Location: The store's delivery radius
Through an investigation, we managed to reach the size of the audience found on social networks, in our example, this audience would be 200 thousand people.
By projecting conversion rates, CPM, CPC and CPA, we were able to create a specific media plan to reach this audience on the internet and the cost of this campaign.
It is possible to plan only by thinking about audiences, that is, in a broader way. This happens mainly in services or products of necessity, that is, that are bought by a strong pain.
Example 1 - My light bulb broke down and I need to replace it immediately. I search for light bulbs on Google and get an offer from the electrical supply store.
Note here that I don't need to know about hobbies, lifestyle, age, or social class to sell such a product, however, they are usually products with a lower average ticket and less added value.
However, it is important to note that the more specific the offer and the greater the connection between communication and customer pain, the better the perception of value and, consequently, the greater the profitability, retention and brand promotion.
Keeping this in mind, the ideal is to have a well-defined persona so that your communication is always assertive and connected with her pains and desires. You can start without one, through the target audience, but over time you can identify it and thus map your ideal customer.
The ideal customer (ICP) is a specific profile of your target audience, a set of factors that identify the characteristics of your best customers, those who buy faster and are more satisfied to look for similar audiences with greater propensity to purchase, greater retention and promoting your brand to other customers.
This tool is especially important for the qualification of your customer for the sales team as it generates a ranking (lead score) that identifies opportunity customers, thus building lasting relationships
Among the factors to qualify the ICP are: Level of public engagement with the company, purchase frequency of the persona, level of awareness of the product or service, level of need for the product or service, average ticket, decision-making power for the purchase.
In practice, the ICP needs to be identified through key questions when registering the customer or converting the lead when downloading rich content, as in the example of the electrical supply store:
ICP are architects consolidated in the market with recurring partnerships, that is, when generating rich content or registering a new architect client, they can ask about their position in the company.
Form example:
What's your profession?
Answer: The ICP client would respond Architect
What is your position in the company?
( ) CEO Owner ( ) Manager ( ) Intern ( ) Freelancer
If the customer answers that he is an architect and CEO or Manager, the lead is classified as an opportunity and thus the salesperson is able to map it to a closer relationship.
If the profile is very far from the ICP and the store's service volume is high, the ideal is for the seller not to contact this customer since there is no clear indicator of sales and a healthy sales history. An easy solution is to have a contact via message, Whatsapp or email or forward it to sales support, such as a pre-salesperson.
In business based on customer service and sales, it is normal for some customers to consume a lot of time and negotiate so much that the sale becomes unattractive. They are usually customers who cancel more easily or have problems after the sale.
Not having an ICP customer can attract negative customers to your business who will become detractors of your brand, evaluating negatively without accepting an opportunity for a solution, and even cause a strain on the sales team, taking up time that a healthy prospect would be buying.
Once the IPC profile is defined, all campaigns and rich materials need to have direct communication with that ICP client. Therefore, unlike the persona that can be imagined, the ideal is that to create the ICP you have a history of data about the customers.
The ICP classification not only makes the conversion of campaigns greater, but also helps the sales team, because in this way the marketing consultancy is able to deliver more qualified leads and the salesperson can convert them more quickly and easily.
If you've reached the end of this article, it's because you really care about your business and want to see your results grow, so you can count on our team of experts.
We believe that, with these tips, you will be able to understand the importance of having a business with this information. We are sure that once implemented, your results will be much better than ever before.
Follow our social networks to receive rich content aimed at Owners, Managers, Managers of physical businesses who want to take advantage of the largest sales tool in the world to expand their business through digital.
