The ability to accurately identify and engage with your target market, through well-defined customer personas, and their associated journeys, is essential in today’s competitive marketplace. This endeavor is not just a facet of marketing strategy; it is a cornerstone of business resilience and growth. The following are essential steps to take, associated benefits, and some examples.
How to develop customer personas
Engage leadership for strategic vision
An in-depth understanding of your ideal customers and how they fit into the corporate strategy is the first step. Engage in comprehensive dialogues with senior leadership to gain a holistic perspective of customer goals and challenges. Understand their strategic vision and how they want to serve specific customer bases. Understand some customer successes, and also the failures.
Uncover opportunities with market research
Conduct thorough market and user experience research to understand not just the market, but also your firm’s unique position within it. This process can identify untapped market opportunities and evolving customer needs that your firm is uniquely qualified to satisfy. Audit competitor strategies to analyze how they are positioning themselves to capitalize on these trends.
Our market research conducted for a financial services company revealed that registered investment advisors, while competitive within their local markets, were willing to share strategies and tactics outside of their markets. This insight helped foster the creation of peer groups, ultimately driving a significant increase in brand loyalty.
Contact customers and prospects for targeted insights
Direct conversations with current and potential clients are invaluable. They provide essential feedback that can challenge assumptions and refine your market targeting strategies. Understanding why current customers selected your firm, combined with understanding the selection criteria of prospects, provides invaluable information about your company.
Segment through data analysis
Utilize quantitative research to segment the market effectively, pinpointing demographic, behavioral, and psychographic trends. This transforms broad market concepts into actionable, targeted segments. It helps identify those that you should focus on, and just as importantly, the those that should be ignored.
Develop personas and journeys
Develop comprehensive customer personas and journeys, based on in-depth user experience research, to represent your ideal target customers. These fictional yet realistic profiles highlight customer objectives, requirements, behaviors, and motivations. Well-developed personas are essential tools that help executives, marketers, product developers, support teams, and other stakeholders align around a shared understanding of the most valuable audience segments to guide strategy.
To complement personas, map out detailed user journeys to uncover key moments of truth for customers as they engage with your company. Analyzing the path-to-purchase and beyond reveals pain points as well as growth opportunities to maximize satisfaction during each stage of the customer lifecycle.
In a project for the National Institute of Health, our personas and journey maps kicked off a strategic discussion about how to serve COVID-19 researchers, and inspired a dramatic technology shift. Here is an example of one of the personas and the associated user journey (note: sanitized to respect confidential information).
Benefits of a customer-driven market strategy
Market Leadership and Innovation
Understanding the market, and your customers, fosters an environment ripe for innovation and market leadership. By intimately knowing your audience, your firm will be well-positioned to anticipate market trends and evolve ahead of them. This proactive stance not only positions your company as a market leader but also as an innovator, consistently offering novel solutions and services that align with the evolving needs and expectations of your target market.
In our work with Royal Caribbean, we identified that a key customer segment wanted to plan vacations prior to the cruise departure. We conceived a pre-cruise planner that yielded a 20% increase in per-person revenue while decreasing cost.
Enhanced Sales Conversion
Precise market identification and customer experience research contribute to strategic targeting, directly leading to enhanced sales and higher conversion rates. By understanding and addressing the specific needs and preferences of your target market, your messaging becomes more impactful, resonating deeply with the audience and significantly boosting your sales performance.
Refined Service Offerings
With a clear understanding of your target market, your service offerings can be finely tuned to meet the precise needs of target clientele. This tailored approach ensures that every service you offer is perceived as valuable and relevant by your customers, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
A pharmaceutical client recreated their artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities based on our research, ultimately yielding a significant increase in the number of users of these critical capabilities.
Superior Customer Experience
A focused target market strategy enables you to craft customer experiences that are not just satisfactory, but exceptional. By anticipating and meeting the unique needs of your market, you create a customer journey that is seamless, personalized, and highly engaging, leading to enhanced customer retention and advocacy.
Brand Strength
Consistently targeting a well-defined market reinforces your brand's identity and messaging. This clear and focused approach helps in establishing a strong, recognizable brand that resonates with your audience. A strong brand not only attracts more customers but also builds lasting loyalty, setting you apart in a competitive marketplace.
Creating a customer-driven market strategy is essential. Businesses that adeptly navigate these waters will not only stand out in their markets but will also set the course for future industry leadership and innovation. By deeply understanding your customers and delivering unmatched value catered directly to them, companies can see business growth for years to come and significantly boost profitability.
There is no alternative - to thrive in the modern era, a customer-centric strategy must be the foundation.