By now, you’ve heard of or read of the importance of building a customer persona. It’ an essential tool in your strategic marketing toolset. A customer personas is the north start to help you stay on course to deliver extraordinary customer value. If you haven’t built yours yet, here’s a free template to help you do that.
But building a customer persona is different than applying it to help you get more customers. The next thing you want to do after you’ve created your persona is . . .
Extract from your customer persona the two to three core customer needs that your customer is really looking to meet. (tweet this)
Here’s what you need to know. Those real customer needs are the hardest ones to measure. That’s because they are psychological needs — like assurance, simplicity, empowerment, pragmatism, etc. Things like agility, clarity, and momentum. Or even things like community, connection, and access. We’ve got a whole list of customer needs if you need a prompt.
The reason you need to identify these core customer needs is that they will plug into your core brand story. Customer needs should be at the heart of virtually every communication you have with your customers, whether it’s in the form of a proposal, an email, your website copy, etc. Why? Because customers actively seek solutions to their needs — their real customer needs. But if your messaging isn’t conveying what they’re listening for, they’ll never know that your product or service is THE solution they’re looking for.
Let’s take an example, straight from one of our new clients, GoatScore. When we first started working with them, I was confounded. First, GoatScore is a service in the DFS space (daily fantasy sports) that analyzes players’ historical play to find opportunities to improve their skill level . . . are you following me? I had no idea what they did. However, as we worked with them building out their strategy we uncovered an essential story:
Daily fantasy sports is electrifying — when you win. But it’s also hard (requiring significant skill and time) — and losing gets old fast. GOAT analyzes and rates your play and matches you with players at your skill level — so you can win, have more fun and get better over time.
The needs we realized that customers were looking to satisfy were simplicity, guidance and context. And, after some inexpensive message testing that we did on Facebook, it shouldn’t be a surprise the simplicity messaging won hands down. It was the answer that was sitting there in front of us all along. Playing, and more importantly winning fantasy sports, is complicated! Simplifying the process for players is something they have already been looking for on their own. When we started advertising with messages that promised to simplify the process, they were a hit and we saw it in clickthroughs and conversions.
So, here’s your assignment. Once you’ve completed your personas, ask yourself, what are their core customer needs, and how will you craft your marketing to satisfy those needs?