We start by gathering some basic insights on your industry and marketplace, and then dive into researching the market and its competitors in greater detail. This helps us to build a foundation for additional discovery.
Once we have some of the details, we get into the interview phase of the discovery process. Interviews of your customers and your internal staff are essential to understanding both your target audience and your marketing operations. We also may interview prospects and customers of your competitors (if they are willing).
The final phase is building the customer / buyer personas, and then connecting them to either your existing marketing operations, or, outline strategies that will better communicate your offerings to your audience. The key to this phase is developing a “plan for action.”
We start the process through a combination of market and competitor research. Then we conduct a series of detailed interviews. Our interviews often include customers, prospects, and internal staff. We also may have conversations with people who have used competitor solutions.
From there, we examine your company’s offerings and sales results to understand how your business is performing, and gather all metrics you are using to measure success.
We will put together a preliminary set of findings to review before we finalize our analysis. Depending on your business, you could have 2 or 3 personas or you could have 15 or 20.
BACKGROUND ON THE PROCESS OF CREATING A CUSTOMER / BUYER PERSONA
When we build customer / buyer personas – we want to be as thorough as possible in our research and in our interviews.
We are going to look at market data, and a lot of information that is publicly available. However, there is going to be a lot of information that can only come from you – the client. So, it is important you are prepared for the work.
Here are basic things to prepare for when developing personas: