Before spending time on content creation and rushing to spend more money on advertising, consider spending some time on your Buyer Persona to help clarify who you are trying to attract.
It seems pretty basic and yet very few companies spend time on this important exercise. If you understand your client or prospective clients better, you increase your chances to attract the right people through all of your marketing assets. Here are a few steps to get you started. What Is a Buyer Persona? A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional character that you create based on real data collected from the market to better understand your target customer. A Buyer Persona offers insights to help you structure your offer and develop your marketing strategy and tactics. It often includes essential elements about demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. You will have a greater chance of understanding how to adjust your marketing strategy with a more detailed Buyer Persona. Any business, small or large, can benefit from this foundational activity. Based on your data collection, start with a list of characteristics of your current customers and go from there. You can have as few as one Buyer Persona to as many as 10-20. It all depends on the market you target and what you are trying to offer. Where to Start? 1) Dig into your current customer demographics and find data that unites them: Location, age, gender, spending habits. Understand how different demographics consume your content. Find similarities and use them to begin the creation of your Buyer Persona. 2) Survey current customers with online surveys or face-to-face conversations. The responses will help you gain better insight into their thinking process, behaviors, etc. 3) Hold small focus groups with current customers. Let them speak frankly about your product and/or the purchasing process. Gather this feedback to help you create your Buyer Persona. 4) Encourage your customers to recommend people from their network to use your product or service and give feedback. 5) As you progress collecting input for your Buyer Persona, take the opportunity to establish your Negative Persona, typically by gathering the attributes of what should be excluded. A Negative Persona will be the type of Persona that should ultimately not be your target. Does this sound like marketing fluff? Well, it’s not. Even though it looks more complicated than it is, it is essential to do this exercise properly so you don’t spend money in the wrong places. It may seem useless to create this semi-fictional character and go through this process. Keep in mind that larger corporations use this exercise to help focus their marketing campaigns. Why should your business not do the same? Think in terms of budget control and how you can optimize your promotional campaigns. Buyer Persona is an effective way to stop spending your marketing budget on the wrong people. It is also useful to gain insight on how to keep your marketing and advertising laser-focused on the right people. What to Expect from This? Developing Buyer Persona allows you to create targeted content and focused messaging that appeals to your target audience. It is the most basic application of your Buyer Persona. Imagine the impact you could have if you can tailor and personalize your message for the different segments of your audience that you target. Some Benefits from Using a Buyer Persona: 1) Improve your overall Branding by aligning your brand and targeting your Buyer Persona. 2) Change your content to speak directly to your Buyer Persona addressing their pain points. 3) Re-allocate advertising dollars to focus on channels your Buyer Persona uses. 4) Segment your email database and send targeted messages to those contacts who fit your Buyer Persona. 5) Rearrange your social media personality to speak directly to your Buyer Persona using the most appropriate social media networks. By creating a Buyer Persona, you can easily target your ideal customer and increase sales, saving precious marketing dollars in the meantime. What Now? Get your team together and start the process. If this exercise seems too complicated, give us a call to walk you through it and help. Get in touch with us.
1 Comment
In this article, we propose a few simple ideas that will help to promote your business to gain and retain clients.
1. Build A Strong Brand Identity A strong brand identity is more than just a pretty logo. Developing a strong brand identity helps you ease your future customers' decision-making process. Customer recognition and engagement are part of an emotional process. They are gained through shared values and vision, belief in the mission and trust in a strong value proposition. Before rushing to create a website or a logo, you need to clarify your values, vision, mission and value propositions. Use a clear and structured format to formulate them. This is key to any foundational work. As part of your strategic marketing activities, consider spending time on your branding assets. Then, lead your brand execution in a thorough and consistent manner across your multi-channel marketing plan. 2. Write and Post Blogs Blogs help establish professional standing and authority in your industry and, help to rank higher on organic search engine results pages. Blogs can also create traffic to your website. Targeted blog topics related to child care, education and development will help you build trust with your future clients. The goal is to demonstrate that you are an authority concerning child care. Another good approach is to invite other professionals, like pediatricians or psychologists specialized in young children, to write blogs for your website. This can strengthen people's perception of your company. Your blog posts should be optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Create a list of keywords for your blog and include them as you progress in the writing process. These keywords will help people to find your blog and, help rank your page higher on search engine results. Consider working with an outsourced digital marketer if you are unfamiliar with SEO or digital marketing. A digital marketer can develop effective topics and write articles with SEO in mind to drive traffic to your website. 3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns PPC is an advertising service run by Google based on keywords. Technically, you create an ad in Google using Google AdWords. Whenever people see your ad online and click on it, you pay for every single click. PPC can be tricky. Some keywords are more expensive than others. Some keywords have more competition than others. Setting your budget in advance and knowing the price of keywords can help you avoid unexpected Google Ad spends. If you are unsure of how best to deal with Google AdWords, the best practice is to refer to a digital marketing expert. 4. Local SEO Local SEO helps promote your services to potential customers in your area at the time they look for them. The principle is to multiply your presence in different ways:
Make sure that your details are uniform across the different platforms. Consistency and uniformity of your inputs will help you with search engines. 5. Host an Event One effective way to get your name out in the community is to host an event. It is an opportunity for your business to clarify goals, objectives and expected outcomes. Be sure to clarify what is the purpose of the event. You may intend to convey information, celebrate a milestone, educate existing clients or persuade new prospects. No matter what your intention is, try define what a successful event means to your business and how you measure it. If the event allows families to meet you, interact with your staff and see your facilities, it's an opportunity to warm up prospects, or retain existing clients. 6. Social Media Marketing Social media platforms allow current and potential clients to interact with you. Send news, create ads, post photos of your staff, parents can see your activity. This helps them to feel more confident that your daycare is the right choice. Be careful about posting pictures of your client's children. You should not post pictures of children without written consent from the parents. A social media business page allows clients to spread the word about your business, leave comments about how well you do, and provides a rating that potential future customers can see. It also allows potential customers to see how well you handle bad reviews. The way you handle bad reviews is important to your online reputation management. Effective Child Care Marketing Strategies and tactics are important when it comes to child care marketing and your business growth. Each of these activities can be reviewed for effectiveness. Remember that you should re-evaluate your strategies and tactics based on your results. If you have any questions or need help with your child care marketing, contact us today! |
Olivier Noël
|