Specify solution based group persona
Any form of communication with the audience require clear understanding of target persona and here’s how to create Ideal customer profile.
Hi 👋, Welcome to the 52nd newsletter post.
When you buy a gift for your friend you consider what they like and throughout the years of memories, emotions and feelings you’ve shared with them - you pick something they love and cherish.
So, why not be as involved in the customer’s buying decisions?
Why not understand them better and provide the best value through the product?
If you understand your buyers, any promotional activities conducted fit in the equation and you know their feelings, behaviours, experiences, demographics, pain points, and goals. It gives you an idea of what they might be thinking when they face a problem, how possibly they think to solve it, how they categorise it and what drives them to choose you.
That’s why there is an ideal customer profile and it’s important to master it.
An accurate buyer persona stops you from confusing customers with what your product is and who it’s for.
It all comes down to creating a buyer persona that is specific towards a solution group.
The healthy habit
Ideally what startups do is keep the target audience in their mind and create strategies based on assumptions without actually talking to customers. Meaning, that the decisions and strategies made till now will be redone by someone new = a waste of time & money.
Consider how bad it could be from the marketing perspective:
Failed to create strong messaging because they never actually talked to customers but have marketing campaigns & partnerships running.
Positioning becomes problematic as it will be targeting a vast group with no differentiator.
The board segmentation of the market makes the acquisition costly because the persona group isn’t specific enough.
Now, carrying your marketing efforts you need a group to represent the problem you’re solving. Having a board segmentation where you have thousands of personas like “our target customers are small business owners, or CXO” makes the communication unclear and confusing.
The key to your startup’s success is building the product for a specific problem for a specific group.
This may also lead to barely making any conversions. Customers across social media, search engines, and any other distribution are bombarded with hundreds of messages every day from companies that want to sell to them. Only a few manage to cut through the noise.
Buyer’s sometimes helps you say the right things
You see, your customers are already facing the problem and when they search for the solution they are given thousands of options, they pick a few and differentiate from them.
The process is already complex. When you talk to the right customers and deeply have a conversation around the experience they have with the problem and solution, they can help you with messaging - they give you a way to communicate with them.
These specific personas are usually the right fit for the product positioning and messaging around your landing page, email campaign, and social media channels. Because those are the words your target segment wants to hear.
How does the buyers’ persona influence your overall product & how to create one?
Most of the founders initially create multiple personas because they think all of them are the core users and create messaging considering them.
Don’t stress if you can’t figure out your ICP for a while. You would want to know where your products fit the most and who would need your product at the moment by targeting the broader audience: maybe it’s startups or Instagram users, etc.
But the faster you figure out your ICP, the closer you get to your product market fit.
Try to get super-specific and narrow with your ICP.
I’m working with this amazing fast-growing startup called Vegpal and we had multiple personas and approaching them was completely different. So I decided to create a list to pick the most unique characteristics, the best value the product provides and what problem it’s solving to create potential ideal customer attributes.
Here’s the ICP for Vegpal:
Attribute 1: Vegan people
Attribute 2: Improving their social life
Attribute 3: Helps them find vegan dating prospects
The point is, that each attribute will help narrow down the prospect who are excited about the product, why they would choose us and why we went after them. And slowly expand where we felt ready.
We’ll know the customers love the product, our app has sufficient development and features without making previous customers leave the product.
This framework comes out of two steps: 1) assume stuff about your customers and 2) confirm this data with real-world evidence. Interview your most excited user, who loves your product and has gained value out of it. This will help you unearth how they approach your product, their thoughts while using it and what their day-to-day life looks like.
If you’ve been working on your product ICP, share with me what you are doing, what challenges are you facing and how you come up with the ICP. 👇🏻
Thanks for reading, until next time!
Ritika👋
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