Food distributor customer portrait. A portrait of a consumer, an example of a portrait of potential buyers. How to create a portrait of your target audience

Generator of new clients. 99 Ways to Massively Attract Buyers Mrochkovsky Nikolay Sergeevich

Potential client portrait

The decision to buy is always made by people, regardless of the type of market - the market is B2B or B2C.

It is important to understand WHO these people are and WHY they buy a certain product.

The same product can be bought by a variety of people and for a variety of reasons, so successful marketing requires a criterion for finding and selecting potential customers.

The main reason for buying is ALWAYS DESIRE (wanting), so the most important sign of identifying (uniting) potential buyers is the similarity of their desires and / or PROBLEMS that they want to solve.

People with similar desires and / or problems, to whom the company has the opportunity to reach out and offer them a solution in the form of a product, exactly constitute the desired part of the market, or niche.

To make it clearer, let's analyze this using the example of a portrait of a potential buyer.

The easiest way to make out a portrait of a potential client is to use Compass. This is a slightly transformed Stephen Pearce model that has been successfully applied in many companies we have worked with and in several of our trainings. And it always gives good results.

What is this model?

If you draw a potential buyer on a sheet of paper in the center, and draw arrows to the left, right, up and down from him, then these arrows, together with their legend, look like symbols of the cardinal points on a compass.

Therefore, the model was named "Compass".

Compass-portrait of a potential client from the training "5 steps to great selling texts for your website" www.lnfoPraktik.Ru/5steps

Figure: 2.Compass portrait of the client

The Wish block is the wishes of our potential client.

Common desires are the most important attribute by which people can be united. You work with a certain market, with a niche, and people with similar desires enter this niche.

In order to achieve their desires, people usually need to do something. This is determined by the Needs component - necessary, necessary.

All this happens not in the air, but against the background of Experience - some kind of experience: how a person has already achieved what he wants, or did not achieve, what experiences he experienced about this, and in general, how he feels in this regard.

There is another important part - this is the Problem. A problem is a contradiction between what a person wants and what he actually needs to achieve what he wants.

If your solution, your goods or services help a person achieve what he wants, give him what he needs, resolve a contradiction taking into account his life experience, then everything will be in order - your product will find its consumer quite easily.

To make it clearer, let's look at examples.

Example 1

The market (niche) is people who want to quit smoking. It is easy to combine them on this basis. Some goods and services are already being produced for them. They have a desire to quit smoking.

What is actually needed for this? To do this, you need to stop buying and smoking cigarettes.

What kind of life experience can they have in this regard?

Smoking helps relieve stress, calm down. Someone tried to quit, but he is pulled again. Someone suffers from the fact that they realize the dangers of smoking, and from the fact that it is inconvenient for him to be in places where smoking is prohibited.

Thus, a contradiction arises: I want to quit, but at the same time I want to continue smoking.

One solution is e-cigarettes, which allow you to quit smoking without actually quitting. A person still takes some imitation cigarette in his mouth and can refuse regular cigarettes.

Example 2

Another common example that can be used to illustrate the compass portrait is the market for people who want to lose weight.

To lose weight, most often you need to eat less and move more. But this is precisely what those who want to lose weight most often do not want.

So there is a contradiction.

If you found a certain product that would allow these people to maintain their old way of life: to eat anything, move a little, but at the same time would allow them to lose weight, then such a product would be in demand.

It is on this that the demand for weight loss techniques that you have probably seen is built. "Don't eat these three foods and you will lose weight without changing your lifestyle."

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Buyer Persona, Customer Portrait, Character, Target Audience - these synonymous expressions are used to describe an imaginary, generalized image of an ideal potential buyer.

A clear customer profile is critical to successful marketing, sales, product development, and service delivery. This is one of the first tasks that need to be completed, since the requirements for the store depend on the target audience and its preferences. There is a well-known phrase: "You cannot hit the target that you have not set." This accurately describes how important it is to have a clear portrait of the client.

Why do you need a client portrait?

A deep understanding of a well-defined client profile helps:

Determine where he spends time, which means, understand where the presence and activity of the business is necessary.
Advertise more effectively. Money will be invested more wisely if you know where and for whom to advertise, thereby ensuring maximum exposure to potential customers.
To make advertising materials closer to the client, thanks to a better understanding of his problems, joys, desires and needs.
To provide goods / services of higher quality and to develop them, as it will be possible to anticipate the behavior, needs and problems of customers.

Also, the portrait of the client is a key step in drawing up a marketing plan.

Client portrait creation

Obviously, it is important to have a well-defined portrait of the client, and the question is how to create it. The good news is that creating your ideal client is easy when you ask the right questions.

What questions would be correct? To find out, just download the complete guide to help you create your own client portrait. This guide will help you collect all information, knowledge, experience and research results in a beautiful and presentable format.

Explore our guide to creating a customer portrait, and start your journey to successful marketing, sales, product development and service delivery that will fully satisfy your target audience.

There may be several portraits of an ideal buyer

Sometimes one customer image is not enough. In fact, most companies have more than one ideal customer, especially if they offer multiple products / services. The best way to identify their portraits is to tackle each one in turn. It is recommended that you start with the one that brings the most value to the business (logical, right?).

In the process of this, the realization may also come that one business is trying to cover too much, and it would be better to narrow down its specifics in order to occupy a certain niche, and there already offer its customers the best products / services.

Portrait of a negative client

Creating a negative portrait can be just as rewarding as just portraying the client. A negative portrait is a generalized image of a person you would not like to have as a client.

Sometimes it becomes easier to decide which customers you want to serve if you understand which ones you don't want to serve. It is recommended here to present an image of a client that would be a complete disaster for the business, and fix all those reasons that would lead to a failure in the relationship.

The main thing is to focus not on personal qualities, because of which it is difficult to work with this person, but on those things that make a certain product or service unsuitable for him (for example, a too high price, the possibility of increasing customer churn, or insufficient conditions for in order to achieve long-term success).

What data should be in the client's portrait

1. Demographic indicators. Age, gender, education, income level, marital status, occupation, religion, approximate family size. These are usually the easiest things to identify.

2. Psychographic indicators. They are more complex and require a deeper understanding of their customers. These indicators are based on values, attitudes, interests and lifestyle. For example: A client leads a healthy lifestyle, values \u200b\u200bfamily time, lacks free time, and uses Pinterest to craft at home.

3. The name of the image will help to humanize its profile. If your target audience includes both men and women, you can choose both a male and a female name.

4. A face for the profile will help visualize it. On the internet, you can find stock photos associated with the image.

5. Creation of a dossier. The dossier is a page that contains all the information about the image, including name, details, photograph and history about it.

6. Writing a story about your client portrait. This story should tell about the relationship of the portrait with the company and its product / service. What did he think about before purchasing the product? How did he feel? Why did he feel this way? What was he looking for? How did he hope to solve his problem? What did he want to achieve? How did he find / find out about the company? How did he feel after buying the product / using the service?

Examples of tables and templates for creating a client portrait

Portrait demographics

Portrait interests

Business and industry (architecture, banking, business, construction, design)
Entertainment (games, activities, films, music, reading, television)
Family and relationships (short-term relationships, serious relationships, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, parenting, wedding)
Health and wellness (bodybuilding, diet, exercise, meditation, healthy eating, gym workouts)
Food and drink (alcoholic drinks, food preparation, food, restaurants)
Hobbies and activities (art and music, gardening, pets, travel, vehicles)
Sports activities
Other

Portrait behavior

General information about the portrait

A ready-made example of an ideal client

Victoria is an individual entrepreneur, she is a little over 35, she has been in business for over 1 year. Victoria works alone and runs all parts of her business.

Victoria enjoys working with people and loves what she does, but she sees her dream of freedom, mobility and control over her life recede every day. She enjoys owning her own business and it gives her some mobility, but she feels like her business is in control and running her, not the other way around.

Victoria is quite successful and earns about 100,000 a month, but she has less time to do what she likes and more time to spend on the business part of the business. Victoria is already too overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of her business - but nevertheless, she wants to grow. Her business is no longer profitable, because she has to do things that she is not very good at.

Victoria sees the prospect of becoming a major entrepreneur and hiring a team of people who will do things that she cannot and does not want to do, as well as automate routine work that takes too much time.

She is ready to fully focus on marketing. Victoria is well aware that marketing and comprehensive measures can take her business to the next level. Its goal is to increase income, build systems and expand the business. By applying these strategies, she will be able to make enough money to hire staff and ensure stability.

conclusions

At the most basic level, creating a portrait of the ideal client will help a business become more efficient. Combining a customer image with a marketing strategy is the best option to grow your business rapidly. Here are a few things to do when creating a client portrait:

First of all, create a negative portrait in order to clarify which consumers you do not want to deal with, and which are not suitable for this product / service.
Give the client a name, appearance, and personal story to bring it to life. You need to be as specific as possible: the more details, the better.
Create one portrait, and if you want to make several more.
Create a portrait based on market research and customer feedback, not your own opinions and impressions.

A customer portrait is a series of characteristics that allow you to better understand the target audience in order to select interesting content for it. Segmented database mailing is77% from the ROI of email marketing, because users are more willing to accept content that resonates with their needs.

According to statistics , segmented mailings demonstrate + 14% open rate and + 22% CTR compared to mass mailings. And if you still do the same mailings throughout the address book - it's time to change something. Today we will tell you how to get an idea of \u200b\u200bthe audience, and where to get the information from, in order to send targeted campaigns to individual segments in the future.

What does the client's portrait consist of?

Geographical position

Information about the geographic location of subscribers will come in handy in order to choose the optimal time for mailing, send out information about great deals in the nearest stores. Use this data to create a useful, informative newsletter.

Floor

Men and women perceive information and behave differently, so it is worth dividing your mailing list into segments by gender.

In 2003, Joe Hellock performedstudy to reveal color preferences among men and women. The study involved 232 people. The experiment showed that 57% of men prefer blue. Most women also chose blue as their favorite. Interestingly, the second favorite color of women is purple, but for men, purple is the second most unloved color. There are different tastes for you.

Another study conducted by Anya Halbert and Yazhu Ling showed that men prefer bright colors, while women choose more relaxed colors.

The decision-making process is also different for men and women. It is important for a man to know why he needs this or that product and what problem he will solve by purchasing it. Concentrate on the product, briefly describe the important characteristics if the target client is male.

A woman needs emotions and social proof to assess the similarity of the situation for which she is looking for a solution. Tell the woman more about the brand, about the lifestyle, what feelings this or that product will cause in her. This way you can send more relevant offers to your subscribers and increase yourrevenues by 50% and sales by 14% .

Age

Users of different ages respond to emails differently. Choose the right tone of voice and relevant content based on your age. Concentrate on which age group will be interested in your proposal. A ticket to a rock concert is unlikely to attract the attention of those over 50, and a bottle of expensive wine will not appeal to the younger generation.

The email design can also be changed depending on the age of the audience.Research results have shown that over the years the dislike for orange and yellow is growing - such factors should be taken into account when choosing a color scheme for an email template.

Position and income level

Statistics show that segmented mailings by position and level of earnings bring+15% to annual income. Executives and middle managers have different income levels and will not be interested in the same content. Divide your mailing list into segments based on the rank of subscribers. This will help you create an audience-focused newsletter. Add income levels to this factor and include products and services in your mailings that match the price interest of users.

How to collect data

Forms when subscribing or creating an account

When a user signs up for a newsletter or registers on the site, offer to fill out an additional questionnaire with questions about age, location, work or preferences. Choose information that is relevant and useful for your email campaign and focus on it.

See below the questionnaires that users fill out when they sign up for the Houzz newsletter.

Alternatively, after subscribing, send a welcome email with additional questions.

Remember those, in order not to complicate the subscription process, you should limit yourself to a few questions ... Users will not waste a lot of time, and you will use the information received for future segmentation.

Ask questions and when the user unsubscribes from the email campaign. Use the findings to refine and improve it. Find out why the subscriber leaves you, as The Daily Sip did in the example below.

Polls

Polling is a powerful tool to get new information about subscribers. With interactivity, polls liven up monotonous mailings and increase user engagement. As statistics show,25% of people respond to polls ... You will learn the opinion of subscribers about the newsletter and determine their preferences, and this data will help to correlate with the expectations of the audience.

In this example, Mabel's Labels invites subscribers to take a survey.

Google Analytics

The Audience section contains data by age, gender, and location. It will take a couple of clicks to view this information.

Click the Audience tab on the left panel:

You will see data that will be useful for:

Google Analytics provides information about the browsing history of your website pages. Use this data to segment your address list and attract leads. By understanding which page of the site and product users are viewing more often, it will be much easier for you to create a targeted mailing list that will cause a greater response from users.

Google Analytics automatically generates a report on the number of sessions at all stages of the sales funnel, and on abandoned carts. Collect the data, review the report, and send the customer an email reminder about the product in the cart, offering a discount on it.

CRM, CMS systems

Subscriber data is stored in the CRM system. Integrations between existing databases and the email marketing platform will help you effectively manage the collected user information.

For example, the manager of a company that deals with real estate abroad knows that the client is looking for a villa on the island of Koh Samui and speaks Russian. With the help, the company will be able to send similar offers to the user.

Integrations automatically transfer data from one system to another. This makes it much easier to create new mailing lists. Use the data collected in CRM over the period of interaction with the subscriber and, on its basis, select content for mailings on the selected segments of the address base. And then the newsletter will become more personalized.

Alternative methods

Online Communities

The advantage of such communities is that users communicate online about hot topics related to the company or products, and you get insights from the source non-stop. You will plunge into the problems and difficulties of the consumer and understand how to improve the product: make it more convenient or practical, change the design or packaging.

Sephora, a network of perfume and cosmetics stores, has created a separate Beauty Talk forum, where consumers communicate, ask questions, share problems and ideas for new products. On the forum, users post photos of makeup with links to the products used and leave reviews. This is how the customers themselves advertise Sephora products.

Open-ended interviews

The purpose of such an interview is to understand the consumer's worldview, determine reactions to what is happening and figure out the logic of actions.

Set a clear purpose for the conversation and set the respondent in the right direction. Don't write questions ahead of time and be prepared to improvise. Such an interview will work only in the form of a sincere, lively dialogue, conducive to truthful and detailed answers.

The information received can change your vision of the product, push on new ideas for its development and change the marketing strategy. Take Procter & Gamble as an example.

In the mid-90s, the company spent millions to develop a home odor control, Febreze. However, the new invention was not in demand, because the housewives were accustomed to smells in their houses and they did not need a remedy for an unpleasant smell at all. Then Procter & Gamble conducted interviews with buyers to find out how, when and what the product was used for.

Among those interviewed was a housewife who shared that a freshener for her is a nice finishing touch to her daily cleaning. It was these words that made the company rethink its advertising strategy and position Febreze not as a rescuer from unpleasant odors in the house, but as an air fragrance. Two months after the change in strategy, sales of the freshener had doubled.

Remember, email marketing isn't just about sending updates to your subscribers. Explore subscriber data, build an audience profile, segment mailing lists and strengthen relationships and improve email metrics.

Every year people have more and more opportunities to interact with enterprises. And increasing channels and platforms doesn't necessarily translate into better experiences and customer experiences. Most companies understand the need to improve customer experience. But not everyone has the resources and experience.

Customer Persons (c) adespresso.com

The client has the opportunity to receive information from the company and services at different points of interaction: whether it be a website, a contact center, consultants in retail outlets, social networks, search engines. At all of these points, the company may collect disparate marketing data. Service provision budgets can be unevenly distributed, inadequate to the real significance of a particular point for the client.

Simply investing in creating and improving customer experiences without a clear understanding of how your customers are feeling right now is also dangerous. At least because it will not be clear how much the customer experience has improved, because there will be no data to compare the results with.

Therefore, customer journey maps () really lead to significant positive changes in companies.

Customer journey mapping as an example of customer-centric practice

The news that Coca-Cola has stepped down from its CMO position in favor of a Director of Development and Innovation confirms a shift towards new tools that are not focused on business metrics, not product (object metrics), but customer experience and satisfaction (subjective criteria).

Development in a highly competitive environment forces companies to turn to new growth resources. It's getting harder and harder for us to compete in technology, or with declining costs in marketing tools. It becomes more and more difficult to compete both on the basis of price or on the value level. One of the unpacked reserves is the subjective client experience, its impressions, sensations and thoughts. These factors were previously flagged as unpredictable and were considered secondary. In this case, it is extremely important to find out what happens to the client at different stages and at points of contact:

How does he feel? Is he annoyed? Excited? Curious?
What is he thinking about? Imagine how he will surprise his friends and colleagues? Will he get a promotion? Finally overcome a difficult stage in your life? Will he learn new skills?
What are his expectations? Is he waiting for speed in service? Flexible rates? Or instant software installation?

Taking the time to find these answers can help you put yourself in your customers' shoes and build empathy. This is what separates the lazy promoter from the ingenious concierge. The first mumbles about the features and differences of the product, the second responds to requests and concerns. The first one explains the buyer's mistakes by ignorance and misunderstanding of the product and conditions. The second always takes the side of the buyer.

While these ideas may seem obvious to you, in practice it is much more difficult to make such a transition for an entire company than just analogy with a salesman and a concierge. Many businesses are still focused on products and internal processes rather than the customer and their adventures on the way to you and the journey after receiving your product.

And the first step in this transformation is the development of portraits of your clients, the so-called "persons". Then - creating a travel map of these persons: how they come to you and your product, what happens to them during and after service.

Customer journey map starts with the person of your client

Your customer portrait is a graphical representation of your ideal customer based on research, CRM data, conversations with recent customers and those who have decided to delay receiving a service or product for any reason, data from NPS. Some marketers mistakenly believe that "customer portrait" is just another fashionable definition of audience segmentation based on previous actions. This is not true. The client's portrait includes deeper aspects: relationships, feelings, personal goals.

First, you need to make a list of 50-75 customers who have made purchases and refused or postponed them for any reason. Please contact your sales team, contact center, or support team to help you create this list. Let them also help arrange a short interview with them. At best, 8-12 of your clients will agree to meet with you and have a frank conversation. Every such conversation should be recorded.

As you work through the list, you can discover. that you already have some general demographic and behavioral information that provides valuable insight into the consumer profile. Keep in mind that “reading Forbes,” “using facebook,” or “going to restaurants” will not work for a portrait. It will be important for you to find out what drives your customers to do all this.

You need to treat these conversations as if you were a professional investigative journalist. Or, you will need to hire an outside specialist to assist with these interviews. Whoever conducts the conversation, it is necessary to ask clarifying questions, listen carefully to reports, dig deeper so that customers sincerely share their impressions of how the process of evaluating, deciding, buying and using the product went.

Here are some examples of questions that you can focus on when making your own list:

Could you recall any moments in which you experienced pleasant surprise / slight disappointment / inconvenience / dissatisfaction / anger.
Imagine that you find a small, non-critical flaw in a product during use. What exactly could you forgive our company for?
What specific arguments would you give in favor of our company / product if your friend began to criticize us?
What moments do you remember fondly? What can you remember with irritation?
What effect did you expect in your life when thinking of purchasing such a product? What was valuable to you? What exactly did you enjoy using the product? What expectations have not been met?
At what stages in your interaction with us did you experience difficulties, inconvenience or lack of information?
What doubts did you have and at what moments?
At what point did you decide to choose another company / postpone the decision. What was the reason for this? At what point did you feel that you want to refuse us?

Whoever leads the conversation should ask trial questions and listen carefully as you dig deeper so that customers can share their impressions of the appraisal and purchase process.

You need to find out why the person decided to look for a new product, who exactly was he looking for, what brands he considered and why, how he rated those brands, what was important to him and what worried him.

Key takeaways when drawing up a client portrait

Only after conducting 8-12 in-depth interviews will you be ready to summarize the results. To speed up the results, you can order the transcription of audio files into text documents. Read all entries and highlight key phrases or paragraphs that contain the following information:

What prompted buyers to start looking for a new product or solution?
What were the decision criteria?
What results did they want to achieve? What effect did they expect?
What other types of products or suppliers did they consider?
Why did they single out or choose them?
What was important to them?
How did they feel while driving in the buying process?
What did they perceive as a risk to the project / product / solution?

Transfer the highlighted findings to the pivot table, grouping by topic and response. You should have 3-5 or more documented steps for making and evaluating a decision, making a deal, using a product. For each stage, you should have 6-12 quotes from real customers.

Client portrait. Is one enough or can you make several?

Your first reaction may be to want to create multiple portraits because you've gathered a lot of unique information. It all depends on whether it would be possible to appeal to all these persons with one call or whether you need to create differentiated messages.

If there are completely different purchase expectations and a unique approach is required, then additional porters will be required. But in general, only one portrait can be used for further work.

How customer portraits affect marketing messages

It's important to make sure you don't slip back into talking about products, business processes, or specifications. Customers' words and feelings should remain at the center of your brainstorming session. Not memorized corporate speeches and marketing terms and definitions, but the feelings and experiences of living people. You may realize that you need to redesign your marketing messages. Perhaps you will see that your product needs to be supplemented with additional functions or, conversely, simplified. Is it possible to include conclusions in sales tools? How you can use these messages in positioning and detachment from competitors.

If you have several persons, is it possible to adapt your site for each of them? Is it possible to create rules based on the definition of a customer portrait and show each of them their own site structure? For example, just changing the slider or highlighting certain items or products.

Frequent mistakes in drawing up customer portraits

Getting quick results can be a big temptation for marketers looking to jump start a new tool. Taking the shortest route is not the best option, otherwise it is great to make the following mistakes.

Create a blank image or portrait based only on demographic data
Sometimes marketers who are under deadlines or lack of resources create dummies. It could be a photo from a photo bank or a drawing of a person who, in their opinion, is similar to the target customer. Seemingly specific characteristics may be attached to it, for example: a user of an old poppy, a regular at a coffee shop, a freelancer, has a higher financial education. This data has only superficial benefits that will lead to old marketing moves.
Dependence on sellers or sales representativesSalespeople and reps can actually give you a great angle, but they are usually of little use for shopper portraits. Many buyers decided to purchase your product even before the store came to your place and your representative greeted him. And their conversation mainly goes around the technical characteristics, clarification of conditions and options. Not many salespeople own technicians. So they won't be able to give you the most important information about what exactly drove a particular customer.
Underestimating the interview processIn order to figure out the seemingly endless "why" you need someone who has the desire and / or financial motivation to ask the right questions. If you are forced to do this work yourself, you need to be patient, not interrupt the client when it seems to you that he is talking platitudes and always ask more questions and clarifications than seems enough. Otherwise, information will be lost that could play a critical role in formatting your marketing message or customer journey map.
Using portraits designed by other departmentsImagine that, in the midst of work, you find out that another department has just completed a similar study. You look at the results of their work and they are excellent! Do you think that if you take these documents and save valuable time, and send the budget to other research?
In most cases, this approach does not work. If another department has been developing portraits of people who buy ski equipment, you cannot take these porters to sell tents. It is also impossible to take the warmers of people who open deposits to promote loans - although most of the audience may overlap. In different situations, the same person makes decisions in different ways, evaluates the product differently. Think of yourself ordering inexpensive beers with friends on Friday and choosing wine at a formal reception. Two different people!
Using portraits of leaders, not real buyers (in the B2B segment)This is a common mistake in the B2B sector. We think that our customer is a director or leader. But unless you're selling products to small or medium-sized businesses, executives are rarely your direct customers. In medium and large companies, managers rely on their subordinates and even assistants to make decisions! They will get involved in the decision later when it's time to choose from the two remaining options. And it would be nice if you were one of them!

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“We are preparing this infographic for Lena. And the article will go for Peter. " Sounds strange? This is a way to make content targeted at the target audience, and Lena and Petr are representatives of different target audiences. Writing so that Peter, the HR manager of a small car dealership, understands, is much easier than for the conventional "m / f from 18 to 65".

Before the start. Let's immediately agree on the terminology so that there are no questions and misunderstandings.

Buyer portrait \u003d Buyer person \u003d Character

I use all three definitions as absolute synonyms. All of them are found in the article in the same sense, the definition of which I will give a little later. Even in marketing, the term is widely used customer avatar.

Let's start with why you need all this.

What is a buyer persona for?

In short - to improve communication with customers and sell better and more.

The persona of the buyer allows you to better understand customers - their motivations, expectations and real reasons for cooperation, psychology - and makes it possible, based on this information, to build a marketing and sales strategy in such a way as to better meet needs and build long-term relationships.

Definition and some theory

A buyer persona is a detailed portrait of your ideal customer.

Right away, I wanted to highlight the keywords in the definition itself, but I realized that I would have to curl the entire line. Therefore, once again about the key points:

detailed
portrait
ideal
client.

Let's start with ideals. Remember the Pareto principle? So, ideal buyers are the very 20% of your customers who provide 80% of all profits. If you divide this 20% by five, you can distinguish a group of 4% of customers, which will give more than 60% of the profit of the entire company. They are the elite among your clients. Based on the study of these small groups, customer portraits are developed.

The detail and completeness of the description is an important criterion for a character. How completely you work out and describe the ideal client determines how much the persona of the buyer you have developed will correspond to reality (and surprise - not to meet your expectations).

In the process of developing a portrait of a buyer, sooner or later you will encounter a paradox: your ideas about ideal customers will diverge from the data that you get in the course of an objective analysis. Just be ready for it. And a little later we will tell you how to live with it and what to do.

Here are some examples of what character profiles developed by our colleagues at Hubspot might look like.

If you look at the examples above, you will see that the customer portrait has two elements.

A portrait itself is a photograph, a visualization of who you are dealing with.
A story is a story about a person, a description of his achievements, goals, pains, principles - everything that influences the decision to start or continue cooperation.

Take a closer look at Mary, Ollie and Erin - these are not some abstractions, but real people. You understand that Mary and Ollie will immediately buy a little for a trial, but if they see the result, they will order more and more. At the same time, Mary will often ask questions and be interested in technology, and Ollie will simply count the profit and unfasten some of it to you. But Erin with the same sweet smile will have you for a long time and tediously before paying a lot of money at once. Already at this stage, you can see how you can change the sales and marketing strategy, what scripts to prepare for each type of customer and optimize work with them.

Here is an example from Russian practice, which was kindly provided by UXpresso.

How to create a character for your business?

It couldn't be easier! In fact, this is painstaking and intellectual work. It starts with an analysis, the purpose of which is to find the very ideal clients that we wrote about above.

So what does it take?

Raise accounting and find out which of the existing customers pays more / longer / more often / more accurately.
Interview sales and customer service employees, ask them to single out the best 3-5 customers and justify their choice.
Compare the two lists and select those that both your accountant and your employees think are ideal. The accountant, of course, has priority, because a bank statement, by definition, is more objective than people's judgments.

The first surprise awaits you here. Because your opinion about ideal clients, the opinion of the accounting department and the employees, can differ greatly.

Yes, an accountant and managers may hate your distant relative, with whom you work from the very beginning, go fishing, and who likes to talk on the phone for a long time, but is not in a hurry to pay the bills. Conversely, give great characteristics to customers you have never seen before, and they pay accurately and don't ask stupid questions.

What to do about it? Accept, believe and continue to work with objective information - to make a real portrait of the buyer, and not paint with broad strokes of dreams and abstraction.

The sample of clients at this stage will be larger than the 1-2-3 characters we need. Even if you have a young and small company, there are at least 10-15 people with whom it is pleasant and comfortable for you to work. This is normal. Now is the time for the next stage.

We study, compare, weed out and combine

We need to create a separate profile for each client we analyze. We already have some of the information: financial reports and employee reviews - you just need to distribute it according to customer profiles. But this is not enough.

We still have a lot to find out. Below is a rough list of things to learn about customers.

Working information

Information about the company (size, financial indicators, type, industry).
The position of the person in the company (position, number of subordinates).

Demographic data

Age.
Income level (specific figure).
Place of residence, living conditions.
Education.
A family.

Goals, fears, objections

The main goal is as your client.
Secondary purpose.
How do you help achieve these goals?
The main fear associated with your product (not abstract).
Other fears.
How do you solve these problems?
Main objections to working with you.
How do you stop these objections?

Values

Core values.
Why did the client choose you?

Now for the fun part: how to get this information?

We study customer profiles on social networks. We add all the necessary data to the profile. Don't forget about photography.
We extract information from any open sources: interviews, blogs, corporate mailing lists, activity on forums - anything can be useful for developing a portrait. Do not forget to lovingly store everything we find in a profile.
We call and poll clients on items for which you did not find information in open sources. No matter how great the temptation is to write questions in a letter - do not give in to it and call. Because you can wait indecently for an answer to a letter, and the image that the client will describe after his reflections will be very different from that Vasily or Eugene, with whom you communicate and conclude deals live. After all, people tend to show their best side - it is more difficult to do this in a conversation.

Typically, these three steps provide enough information to create a comparison table and move on to the next step. Some clients will drop out after a detailed study of their history - this is also normal.

Now we only need to compare clients, highlight the closest features and “merge” the types among themselves. This is much easier than it seems, because when all the information is in front of your eyes, everything becomes clear and develops into a clear picture.

It remains only to lay out the information beautifully, and the portrait of your buyer is ready.

For small companies, one or two characters are usually enough. More portraits are usually needed by larger firms working with different market segments: corporate clients (B2B), government agencies (B2G), individuals (B2C). Obviously, in this case one character is not enough, so portraits can be created for each direction.

What to do next?

In the process of developing a customer portrait, you will already begin to look in a new way both at the process of communication with the client, and at all business processes in general. Now you need to go through several sequential steps so that the need for changes is obvious not only to you, but also to other employees.

Introduce your character to your staff. Explain who it is and how it will help you better communicate with customers and sell more effectively.
Print the portrait in good quality and give out several copies to each employee. In the American office of Hubspot, they went further and made life-size figures out of plastic, which were then installed in the office.
Conduct a survey to find out what each employee will change in their work to make communication with customers more effective.

After the staff has become imbued with the person of the buyer, you can proceed to larger changes.

Change sales scripts and introduce new models of communication with clients.
Redesign the pricing and product line to better meet the character's expectations.
Change business processes with a focus on the interests, priorities and needs of the character - different characters.
Implement dozens of small improvements that will help you better understand the client and better meet his needs.
Create an effective content strategy that focuses on the character rather than the talents, kicks, and skills of an in-house or freelance copywriter.

Finally: more about content

There is a myth in the copywriting community that "you need to write so that the text can be read to mom."

But let's be honest: does your mom have a lot in common with the deputy director of operations who is looking for contractors to service CNC machine tools? Or the CMO of a large IT company who urgently needs to launch ads on LinkedIn? Or at least with the owner of an online store of women's accessories looking for new suppliers?

The fact of the matter is that no.

The person of the buyer makes it possible to evaluate the content strategy and the content created as part of its implementation from the perspective of your client. Does he need it? What problems does it solve? How does it fit into his picture of the world? Is it in line with its goals and priorities?

Character orientation allows you to create useful, relevant content. It's complicated. Template and standardized approaches do not work here. But this is insanely interesting.

And it is very beneficial in any perspective: short-term, medium-term and strategic.