Your value positioning statement - or, not being that self-centered loudmouth

Profiling your targeted audience is the first step. Learning what matters to your buyers starts with basic research. Whether you have existing customers or are a startup, ask yourself questions based on assumptions about the patterns that tie your target audience together. Not all are obvious and straightforward. Initial questions will center around demographic, firmographic, and psychographic information -- such as industry segments, company size, titles, gender, age, group memberships, education, location, goals and pain points. Many of these answers can be found with online search based on reputable third-party reports and surveys. Some will give conflict information. Just remember that is a first pass of high-level questions about your collection of assumed users. You are looking for trends and more than likely will discover a new direction of thinking to pursue. Nothing is in concrete here and in fact, more questions will arise.

Buyer’s persona - better answers through better questions. Go deeper and give your buyers a voice. It’s like a scientific experiment. You’ve made assumptions and now have to prove or disprove each. The only way to do this is with interviews -- lots of them. Surveys are good and email is ok. The best way is to make appointments and get out of the office! But, what questions do you ask? If you pose biased questions, you’ll get skewed answers. Focus on the buying process and how decisions are made -- because that’s what you need to influence. Ask about challenges and the priorities to overcome them. Ask about business and personal success factors and barriers to attainment. Ask about how decisions are made, criteria used, and what sways the process. Dig for expectations, concerns, preferences, motivators, and favorite information sources. Make note about their values and personality during your conversation. Go back to office and make a big matrix for each conversation with columns grouped by questions type. Then circle key words and phrases that pop up often. You can now create your first draft buyer’s persona that answers who, where, when what, why, and how. The truth is out there, find it.

Buyer’s journeys - market and sell the way your buyers buy. The fastest way to drive revenue is to understand the three stages to your future buyer’s journey; awareness, consideration, and decision. Armed with what you learned in the first two steps above, work through the journey your ideal customer travels. At each stage think about what you can do to help your buyer. This “give to get” attitude will help you speed up sales. Map the decision-making process with an arsenal of marketing and sales strategies, tactics, and tools that apply to each. For instance, initially education plays a big role in gaining awareness. The persona you defined will tell you what appeals to your target audience early on in their journey. There’s something that they need to know and they are searching for it. It may be a specific type of solution (“I have a problem tracking inventory and need new software to fix it), or maybe they are barely aware of what the underlying issue is (“my sales are down, why?”), and are frozen into sticking with the status quo. Here’s where you can get future buyers to consider you by teaching them something they don’t know. And because you really understand the mindset of your buyer’s persona, you can use key phrases in your message that will aid in search engine marketing. Plus, you’ll know where to show up to deliver that education in person. Of course you’ll need a valuable lead magnet that’s appropriate for each awareness stage to get them to engage and get the conversation rolling.