What are the important steps in drawing a target customer portrait?

Drawing portraits of target customers is an extremely important step that anyone, any business must perform when participating in business. You need to know who your customers are, how to have the best business strategy. Your target customers (or target market) are the people who will buy or use your product. Before you sell your product, but often before you even make it, you must portray exactly who your target customer is.

5 Steps to draw a portrait of your target customer

Step 1: Collect data about potential customers

A very important first step is to collect data about your potential customer, the more accurate and wide-ranging data you collect, the more solid base you will have on sketching that audience persona. much.

There are many sources of information inside and outside your business that you can take advantage of, such as:

Internal source:

Ask the staff who directly talk to, handle customer inquiries about their view of the target customer.

Some suggested questions:

What age are potential customers usually?

What criteria do they care about the most – price, quality, after-sales service, promotions?

What problems do they often face when using the product?

How is customer feedback about the product/service?

Marketing, sales, customer care, technical support, ... are the subjects you can exploit the most information.

Looking at your employees from a different perspective, they may also be your target customers, so don't be afraid to consult with them for ideas for a new product/service.

For example, your business is about to launch a new fashion model for the autumn-winter 2019 market for women aged 25-35, ask the female employees in the company at that age about their preferences, reasons. As to why they decide to buy, these are valuable pieces of information you can use to create a customer profile.

With this data source, you can only collect most of the information about existing customers without predicting future customer needs. Therefore, it is necessary to coordinate flexibly with other sources of information.

Tools for analyzing customer insights:

The explosion of technology 4.0 has dramatically changed the consumption behavior of customers. In addition to the real-life versions, marketers also need to study the "digital version" of customers. Those are their behaviors, reactions, interactions on the internet.

This is a cheap, easy-to-collect, quality information source that businesses can take advantage of. Some popular analysis tools used today are Google Analytics, Google Trends, Facebook Audience Insight… These tools will give you a visual and comprehensive view of the identifying characteristics of the target audience.

However, if you rely entirely on this source of information, there are also certain risks, marketers can go in the wrong direction if they ignore real-life customer behavior and the context of the purchase. changes from online to offline that you need to be aware of.

Survey sheet:

This is a fairly effective traditional form of information collection used. In addition to the actual survey, marketers can also use online surveys (Google forms, surveys on facebook, instagram...),

The collected information will help you better understand the problems customers are having, what their concerns are, how they view the product/service. From there, draw customer portraits clearly and accurately.

Forums and social networks (competitor fan pages, related groups):

Tracking customer interactions, likes, and comments in forums and social networks is a data collection method used by some businesses today.

You can even go to your competitor's fanpage to see how the target audience interacts on it, thereby drawing experiences for your own marketing plan.

However, to implement this method, it requires marketers to have experience in analyzing and collecting customer information, be careful because maybe the answers or interactions you are seeing are from seeders. love the job of blowing smoke to disturb the market.

Interview:

This method must be used if you want to portray your customer's portrait in the most vivid, clear and accurate way.

Direct contact with customers will help you understand the psychological and emotional developments; how they react to the questions posed, thereby having more accurate data. Because if you only depend on dry online survey forms, many times customers want to receive gifts but mess around with the results, not giving completely accurate data.

However, this method cannot collect the opinions of a wide range of customers, it takes a lot of time and expense to collect, synthesize and analyze… the interview needs an employee with interview skills to steer. questions and answers about goals.

Step 2: Processing data

From the data collected in step 1, proceed to process and classify the information into groups to sketch the initial portrait.

Some ways to classify information you can refer to are:

Personal information:

What age is the customer? Is gender male or female? Where are their living and working areas? What is the marital status? How many children do you have? …

Job:

Do they work as managers, directors or employees? What industry or industry do they work in? What is the company size? What are their professional skills? What tools can they use? What is their typical working day like? What is their view of success?

Life values:

What are the things they value in their work and life? What is important when they consider your product/service? What is the purpose of purchasing the product? What influences their decision-making?

Goals and challenges in life:

This is important information in how to draw customer portraits. What are their work and life goals? What is their order of priority? What challenges and problems do they face? How can you help them with your product/service? What questions do they usually ask when in trouble?…

Where are they in real life and the cyber world:

Where are they in a day? Where do they look for information? Interact on which forums and groups? What channels of communication are they interested in? What social networks do they usually use? (Facebook, Instagram, Linkln…)? What events and seminars do they attend?…

Step 3: Sketch a customer portrait draw customer portraits

After collecting enough data and customer information, marketers will begin to build portraits of the target audience with specific characteristics.

Name and draw a face for that person, attach psychological characteristics, personality, purchase journey, places to visit ... into small stickers on that portrait, so you can visualize a way. most clearly about the target audience.

Step 4: Update information

Of course, marketers need to try to collect comprehensive information and the most accurate data in the process of drawing up portrait ideas.

However, in fact, during the initial testing period, you can recognize identifying features that were previously overlooked when researching information. You can then update more information about the target audience on the sketched portrait.

Step 5: Sketch a negative customer portrait

In addition to ideal subjects, businesses also need to consider drawing negative customer portraits. This applies Pareto's 80/20 rule: Grow 20% of your customers for 80% of your income.

Because there are some customers who have needs and are able to pay for the product; but often have requests that are beyond their ability, or complain about the brand... making it very difficult for your staff to serve, wasting time and money to take care of these customers.

Those are the objects that you need to "avoid" when planning communication. Because the revenue they bring is much smaller than what we spend to take care of them.

Focus on 80% of sales and grow, much wiser than messing with the remaining 20% with no potential for future growth. What are some characteristics of a negative customer: too difficult, too expensive to support, not enough advertising budget, wrong field...? So that your employees, partners, and referrers can "dodge" when they encounter objects like this.