In part 2 of the Campaign Planning series, we’re going to delve into how to develop better campaigns by understanding your target audience. Now that we’ve covered the importance of planning for your marketing campaign by setting goals and using SMART objectives, it’s now time to discuss how you can develop campaign targets by better understanding your customers.
When you fully understand the process that buyers go through, it makes it easier to create a buyer persona based on the needs, wants, and behaviors of your best potential customers.
Having this information allows you to create campaigns that are ready to give buyers what they need and exactly when they need it. In this article, we’re going to discuss:
- Understanding how to think like your customers
- How to create a buyer persona
Think Like Your Customers to Create More Effective Campaigns
Knowing the process your customers go through can help hone your marketing campaign and make it more effective.
Focus your marketing campaign by thinking like your buyers.
Whether they know it or not, all buyers go through different phases when looking to purchase a product or service. This buying cycle can and should be, applied to your marketing campaign. In order to target your marketing efforts successfully, you’ll need to think like your customers and align your specific marketing tactics to the different phases of the buying cycle.
Awareness
This is where your prospects discover their pain point, and they start to conduct research on how to fix their problem. At this point, your company’s strategy should be to develop awareness around a problem, and how your firm can help prospects fulfill their need.
Consideration
At this point, buyers have started to refine their research into how to fix their pain points. They are most likely comparing and shortlisting firms to help solve this problem. Ideally, your business could start using targeted approaches that identify exactly how the prospect needs to solve their problem.
Decision
At this stage, your prospect is ready to make a decision on what product or service will best help them solve their pain point. It’s here that your business needs to make sure that the prospect knows your firm can provide them with the best product/service to help meet their needs.
By thinking like your buyer, you can help hone in on targets for your campaign, which will ultimately help you reach your overall goal.
Creating a Buyer Persona
In order to fully understand the needs of your customers, develop a buyer persona.
Once you have your campaign plan laid out, it’s time to develop a client persona (or personas). A buyer persona is a model archetype of an ideal customer for your business. It’s a fictitious person based on the common attributes of your company’s best-buying audience. Personas allow you to better understand and document who you’re trying to reach with your campaign. Focusing your efforts in this way helps ensure that your marketing campaign is targeted to those potential customers most interested in your product or service at each stage of the buyer’s journey. See some helpful hints below:
- This is the exploration stage, so start to build out who would benefit from your campaign. What is it that potential customers want to know or do? Why are they even looking, and are there any barriers preventing them from finding what they’re seeking?
- At the comparison phase, customers are evaluating potential solutions. Consider what that evaluation process may look like and whether there’s anything that could prevent them from choosing a company like yours.
- Understand how potential customers would select and buy your product or service, and what that purchase process would look like.
- Consider what a customer would expect and how they might use your product or service. Is there anything that might prevent them from utilizing their purchase?
By mapping out how potential customers search for, evaluate, and decide on a product or service can help you develop marketing campaigns that provide relevant content at each stage of their buying process. In addition, it’s important to have personas in order to focus your marketing efforts on the best potential clients. Determining what the best way is to reach and engage with your customers increases your chances of reaching your goal and Company Expert is here to help.