Hi, If you’re reading this it’s because you signed up for it on Effinlazy.com.
We’re not too consistent with these emails, but we really appreciate having you here. If at any time you don’t feel it’s for you, you can find the unsubscribe button at the footer of this email.

​

In this newsletter I'm going to give you the tools to develop your ideal customer persona and leverage that to come up with your marketing ideas.

What we typically see is small businesses keep it kind of vague about who their target market is, and this comes from (in most cases) not wanting to lose out on sales.

Also, you're so tied to what you do, you want to list out all the features of your product or service. But if you can narrow down on one ideal customer you can translate the features into more meaningful benefits for that individual and then create content to better connect with them. This is what elevates you in the mind of the buyer and creates an emotional connection with your brand.

When you anchor to your consumers with an emotional connection, this is going to be far more effective than running ads that say who you are, what you do, why you're so great and why they should buy something.

With all the marketing channels and ways to advertise out there, it's a very noisy place for consumers. And they are either numb to it or too smart to believe what you say. So you have to prove what you say with your marketing.

If you want to learn how to start talking directly to your ideal customer, let's jump into developing the persona.

​
​
​Develop a character you can speak to directly in your marketing to increase sales.

What I'm about to go over with you has a few different names. Buyer persona, customer avatar, audience persona. But all it comes down to is a detailed description of who your perfect client is - a semi-fictional character that distills who the ideal buyer for your business is.

Getting clear on this person helped me come up with the name for my business and even gives me the motivation to write this email (almost) every week. Connecting why you do something to specifically who you do it for is important. It's where the connection happens.

Developing the persona goes beyond the basic demographics and psychographics and goes deeper into an individual and their circumstances. This amount of tangible detail can really allow you to understand this person on a deeper level and tailor your messaging to this individual.

​
​It's all about a deeper understanding.

Most companies will define their customers based on demographics and little other information: A professional female aged 24-36. This doesn't give you an understanding of who you are speaking to on a relevant level.

Professional women aged 24-36, don't allow you to connect with someone because that's not how people identify themselves. Developing a persona helps define who they really are, what they are trying to achieve and challenges they are facing. This helps you understand their underlying emotions, so you can better connect with them at a human level.

Here's an example I did for a client a few years ago.

Segmenting

Now, you might want to develop more than one persona depending on the breath of customer you serve, but for the purpose of this email I just want to focus on the one ideal customer. I’d rather you work on refining one and getting good at that rather than getting you to come up with five that are flaky and lack

​
​
​WARNING: There is no cookie cutter solution to this. Everyone is different so every persona is different. We want to have fun and be creative, but anchor our knowledge, experience and insights to make sure what we are creating is really true.

We want to go from Professional female aged 24-36 to Barbara the Marketing Director at a tech company in London who has aspirations one day opening her own marketing agency and loves spending time trying new restaurants with friends.

​
​
​How to create your own persona.​
​
So how do you do this yourself? I’ll walk you through a few steps to creating a simple persona that will help you level up your marketing.

First, think about all the different types of people you work with or serve. Let's get them all down on paper and get some details down about them.Once you have this list of information to reference, you can decide to choose one ideal customer and develop a sketch of who they are using the categories below.

1. Demographics

To develop this ‘persona’ you’d start with the demographics: age, gender, marital status, job.

I like to start with the demographics because it's the easiest way to build traction towards a niched client; male or female, young or old etc. Keep splitting the market until you can narrow it down.

But, customers are more complex than 'people that buy what you sell', so you need to dig deeper by uncovering their psychographic details

2. Psychographics.

Work on understanding why this client is the ideal client for you. This takes some creative thinking on developing the psychographics. Give them a name, give them a face, write a story about them.

• Where are they in life right now? How did they end up there? What do they aspire to be?
• What sports do they follow? What sports do they play?
• Where do they get the news from?
• What do they drive?
• Where do they live? Describe their home.
• What's their morning routine like?
• How do they like their job?
• How do they unwind on the weekend?
• What big aspirations do they have?
• What's a more urgent goal for them?
• What challenges are they facing?
• What’s stressing them out or keeping them up at night?
• Add your own questions and see where this process takes you

All these things (and more) will help you get a better understanding of them and their needs and once you have that you can look at those needs, the problems they’re facing and how your product or service can meet their needs.

3. Your marketing, solution and deeper connection

Looking at their more urgent goals and challenges, ask yourself how does your solution meet their needs?

Can you build a deeper relationship with them through your content; blogs, newsletters, youtube or social media channels?

Remember to look back at your ‘Superpower’ and see how it connects to this persona. read that here;https://creative-knitter-6290.ck.page/posts/what-makes-you-uniquely-you​

​
​

​
Once you understand their needs you can use the persona to go beyond your marketing. When you can look at your offering, the beneficial outcomes of what you do and connect them to the needs of this persona you can speak more clearly to them, adapt what you do to create solutions that really meet their needs, or even create new revenue streams that meet their needs. .

And that's what it's all about.Taking what you know and adapting to meet the needs of those you serve. While this is a compelling tool for your marketing there may be a point where you need to realize something deeper might need to change in your offering to meet the needs of who you want to serve and then the marketing gets really easy.

So, how will you use this? Are you going to schedule some time to do the activity? If you're super unclear on this do you need to go out and talk to and meet the people you want to work with?

As always I’m available for a coffee to talk through this stuff, tap here to grab a Coffee with me.​

Have a great week,

Sid

P.s. here is the link to the last two emails that work in companion with this activity;

What makes you uniquely you?
​https://creative-knitter-6290.ck.page/posts/what-makes-you-uniquely-you​

Why you do what you do
​https://ckarchive.com/b/68ueh8hk2532k​

​
​
​