Getting to Know Your Target Audience

Developing a useful customer persona for B2B and B2C companies

by Marielle Reussink

How Do You Get to 'Know Your Audience’ Anyway? How to develop a useful customer persona for B2B and B2C companies by The EMMS Marielle Reussink

To succeed in marketing, you have to know your audience!

If you’ve ever worked with me or if you’ve attended one of my workshops, you’ve probably heard me say this over and over again - because really this is the beginning and end of any successful marketing!

Of course that’s easier said than done… What does it mean to know your audience anyway?

In this blog, I’ll break it down, looking at why it’s worth it and how you can get the information you need without getting too bogged down in complex analytics and costly customer research.

Defining Your Target Audience By Creating Personas

A common way of defining your audience (aka your target customer) is to create fictional personas to represent the groups of people who might buy your product or service. One advantage of user personas is that you can define more than one target group that might be interested in what you have to offer, and use your knowledge of them to tailor different marketing campaigns accordingly.

There are different schools of thought around building personas. Some suggest you should get really in-depth and specific, while others think it’s a waste of time to create personas at all.

As with many things, I believe it’s best to focus on making your personas useful, not perfect. A minimum viable persona or mini persona if you will. We’ll get into that more in a moment, but first, let’s quickly cover why personas can be such a powerful tool.

Why Knowing Your Customer Matters

Not all customers are created equal and not all your customers have the same needs!

Imagine for example, you have a skincare line. You may have 2 very clearly defined audiences: a teen audience concerned about acne, and an elderly audience concerned about aging.

By tailoring different products and different marketing campaigns to each of these groups by using your insights about their specific concerns, you can effectively cater to both audiences, instead of losing out on both by targeting them with general marketing messages. Thereby, the older audience will know about your anti ageing products, whilst your younger audience will know about your acne range, thus increasing the likelihood that both will convert and become your customers.

This is just one example of how knowing one’s audience can be a powerful tool for a business to become successful. Now imagine applying this to your business!

When you understand your audience, you can design your offering to solve their problems, tailor your messaging to speak to their desires, and target your marketing campaigns to reach the people who are most likely to buy your product or service and become valuable customers over time. For example, if you’re a B2B company, wouldn’t you like to be able to target businesses that are likely to have a short sales cycle and a high lifetime value, rather than generating a lot of traffic and inquiries from businesses that will never sign a contract?

Clearly knowing your audience matters, as this will increase the likelihood of finding product-market fit, growing a successful business and avoiding throwing dollars down the drain.

Easy, Low Cost Ways to Get to Know Your Audience

If you have the budget, you could hire a user research firm to do market research for your business, but if you’re not there yet, there are several other techniques to gather the information you need to understand your customer and create a useful persona.

Here are some simple strategies that you can use depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C:

B2B Audience Research

If you’re a B2B business, start by assessing your potential audience at the broadest level, then work your way down. You can do this on your own or with a group by brainstorming and using basic online research to gather insights, or using surveys or phone interviews with your existing audience if you have customers already.

First look at the industry as a whole and write down all the information you can gather about the market you’re targeting, who your competitors are and where you fit within the landscape of your industry.

Next, start to assess the companies that could potentially find your product useful. Where are they located? How many employees do they have? Are they startups, SMEs or large corporates? What are their challenges? Why would they benefit from or need your product or service?

Don’t stop here! You’ve only scratched the surface!

As a next step, drill down to understand the individuals you will be selling to and the decision-makers who will be making the final call. In B2B, the person often looking for your solution isn’t the person that will decide to purchase it. Plus, they may pull onboard another party with domain specific expertise to evaluate your product or service. You will need to appeal to and convince all of them!

So think about the different roles you need to target. What would make them go looking for a product like yours? What related products are they already using? How would your product make their lives easier? How will they shortlist and review their options? Which competitors will they be considering as well? How can you stand out?

Once you have an idea of who your ideal clients are, split them into groups if different categories emerge, and write down a summary of their characteristics, motivations and desires.

Voilà, you have your mini personas!

Print them out or keep them somewhere visible on your computer, so you can always refer back to them when creating your communications. Reviewing your personas may even prove a powerful tool when you’re refining your existing offering or designing a new product or service.

B2C Audience Research

Finding your ideal customer can be somewhat trickier for consumer brands, but you don’t have to overcomplicate it. The best thing to do is go out and talk to people.

If you have existing customers, you could ask some of them to share their insights, and if you don’t have customers yet, do a bit of hypothesizing about your target audience, then go out into the world and talk to them. If you have a physical store, spend some time there talking to customers, observing their behaviour and taking note of their characteristics.

Your goal is to be able to make generalizations and group your customers into personas, describing their demographics, and explaining their habits, interests, problems and desires.

The more structured your research, the clearer your answers will be, but that doesn’t mean that you have to use formal interviews or surveys. If you do prefer a structured approach, you could also do an online survey with your existing and/or potential customers to validate your thoughts or to start the process.

Whichever approach you go for, make sure the questions you ask are the right ones! This is where a lot of research fails. Be very concrete and clear why you’re asking every single question and understand how you’re going to use those insights. What does it tell you, why do you need to know this, how will it inform your processes and decisions?

Using Your Personas

Once you have your customer personas, you can put them to use right away by bringing them into conversations about product design, marketing campaigns and business strategy more broadly. But before you go in too deep, try running some tests to validate your findings. This can be as simple as running A/B tests using social media ads or email marketing, targeting new audiences or using new messaging.

Keep in mind that when you define an audience and begin marketing to them directly, you’re essentially excluding other audiences. You don’t want to try to be everything to everyone, but you also don’t want to make the mistake of going after the wrong audience altogether, so do test and validate your findings!

You may find that your research reveals information that defies your current understanding of your target customer. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to throw out your existing marketing plan all together… but you do need to listen to what you’re hearing and use it to make informed decisions.

Chances are that as your business evolves and grows, your audience will shift over time. So pay attention, listen to what your audience has to say and be ready to jump on opportunities to better understand and better serve your customers.