Without a clear portrait of a potential client, it is impossible to competently compile a commercial proposal for the sale of a product or service, and it is even more difficult to correctly address it. The portrait of a potential buyer is the target audience who is most likely to be interested in your offer. It is compiled using the maximum amount of information about consumer demand for the product.
Separation of business segments
It's worth starting the topic with the fact that there are two lines of business - b2b and b2c. The first option is business for business, and the second option is for buyers. In the first case, as a rule, there is no question of drawing up a portrait of the target audience, since the audience is known to everyone, it remains only to concentrate efforts on attracting customers. But the second case is what will be discussed further. For b2c, it is always important to correctly define the audience, regardless of whether it is a business online or offline.
In addition, it is important to know what the target audience forthere may be more than one activity. Experienced specialists always allocate a main group and several secondary ones for work.
Elements of a potential client portrait
Before proceeding to the instructions for drawing up a portrait of the consumer, it is necessary to understand the intricacies of the concept itself. A portrait of a potential client is a complex collective image of a person who is interested in your offer. When creating this image, you visually "draw" in the head of the target buyer, to whom all marketing activities of your organization will be oriented. The portrait of the target audience can have a huge number of different characteristics, because the more of them, the more truthful the image will turn out.
Basic positions for describing the target audience
Any marketer who is faced with the task of describing the target audience for the first time asks himself a few questions:
- How do you determine who your organization's target audience is?
- In what period of strategy development should target audience be chosen?
- Where do you get data to build a social portrait of a consumer?
- What are the characteristics to create a buyer persona?
- How detailed should the description be?
Of course, these are not all questions, but certainly the most basic ones. Next, we will analyze each of the points in more detail. So let's get started.
Target Audience
It can be broad - for example, all consumers of milk products, or narrow (only those whobuys fat-free cottage cheese at a low cost). The wider this circle, the more fuzzy the description will be, since it is difficult to determine the pronounced characteristics of the audience in this case.
You need to create a portrait of the target consumer based on the prototype of the brightest representatives, trying to outline the common characteristics that will distinguish your company's customers from the rest of the market audience. When forming the image of your buyer, it is necessary to describe not only regular customers, but also those who have not yet purchased the product.
At what stage of the strategy should the target audience be chosen?
Begin to draw up a portrait of the consumer should be after the analysis and segmentation of the market, that is, at the stage of developing a positioning strategy. In practice, situations often occur when it is necessary to identify the target audience without a marketing strategy, this is especially true for specialists who are just starting to work in a new organization. In this case, you can proceed as follows:
- Identify the main competitors of the company.
- Make a comparative analysis of your company's product and what competitors offer.
- Send mystery shopper to competitors.
- Describe the value of the product.
- Understand who is currently the consumer of the product and is loyal to it.
- Describe your ideal customer.
- Create an image of the target client based on the received data.
Where to takedetails
In order to form the image of a potential consumer, it is necessary to answer some questions:
- Who buys the product and who doesn't?
- Why is it bought or not bought?
- By what criteria are they chosen, how are they bought and used?
- How do consumers feel about the rest of the organization's products?
- User experience.
The following sources will help you find answers to all these questions:
- Notes in specialized publications about the modern buyer.
- Thematic groups in various social networks (marketing and Internet marketing).
- Existing customers, for example from point of sale to offline. Ask them to take a short survey, ideally a focus group.
- Own site where you can install special counters with traffic analytics.
- Wordstat (study of high-frequency and low-frequency keywords). The latter, by the way, will tell you a lot of information about the portrait of the target audience and their desires.
- Sales managers interacting with existing customers and suppliers (if the business is already up and running). By the way, to control the work of employees, you can hire mystery shoppers.
- Non-competing businesses that, for example, are based in other cities, but are willing to share knowledge and experience about customers.
- Specialized analytics agencies. Maybe you will be lucky and manage to find a competent marketer who will completely take over the search for data for further drawing up a portrait of the target audience.
Characteristics for describing target audience
All the characteristics on the basis of which the image of the buyer is formed can be divided into several groups.
Geography
Here you will need to set the geographic area where the advertising message will be broadcast. Here it is necessary to determine in which part of the country / region / region potential customers live and are located. It makes no sense to advertise throughout the country when your product or service is only available in major cities, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Socio-demographic indicator
It can be divided into three components:
- Customer gender. Representatives of the female and male are guided by different principles, respectively, and they make different decisions. Therefore, in order to draw up a portrait of a consumer in marketing, it is necessary first of all to determine for whom the product is intended. Quite often it happens that it suits both, respectively, the target audience is men and women.
- Age of buyers. This is a fairly large block, since each promotional offer has its own age category. It is impossible to give an unequivocal answer to this question, it will be necessary to establish some kind of framework, for example, the age of the consumer is young people from 25 to 35 years old. Marketing specialists have long divided human life into several stages (school time, students, the beginning of a career path, the rise of a career and its growth, the end of a career, retirement). It is at these stages thatbe guided when compiling a portrait of the target audience, since each service or product has its own age category, to which they will be sold better.
- Education. This criterion helps to understand how professionally developed the buyer is. A lot of targeted advertising campaigns make their division according to it, it can be split into those who have one or more educations and an average income level. Most often, this example of a consumer portrait is used by organizations that offer goods and services for we althy people.
Financial situation
One of the most important criteria when thinking through the image of the buyer is to determine the income level of your target buyers. Here it is important to understand what kind of check you are counting on, and what principles customers are guided by.
If potential buyers of goods have a low income, then it is not advisable to set a high price for the goods. And also it is worth understanding that people with low incomes pay great attention to the price, more precisely, it is the cost that is the key point for them when choosing an offer.
Information channels
This is one of the most important questions when forming a portrait of a potential consumer. Here you need to establish from which specific sources your future customers receive information and answers to their questions. These may be completely different distribution channels:
- Internet search engines.
- Social networks.
- Newspapers.
- Magazines and more.
If we consider online advertising, then it is necessary to establish which portals your customers visit, these can be sites of various directions, for example, a narrowly focused one.
If you are going to engage in attracting customers to a store on an online resource, then you should pay attention to specialized sites where people with the same intentions gather and discuss issues that concern them. These sites can later be used for your advertising campaigns.
How detailed should the target audience be described
When forming the image of a potential buyer, it is necessary to describe the brightest representative. In the process, try to use all the groups of parameters mentioned above. Only in this case the description will be truly portrait. After studying this information, a distinct image should form in a person’s head. Ideally, a collage of several photos should be added to the description to complement the portrait. It is better to prepare two options: a short one, based on 4–5 criteria, which allows you to superficially separate the target audience from the entire market, and a complete one with the most detailed characteristics, its habits, features, character, and so on.
The picture will be complete and detailed if in the process of creation you try to describe the development vector of the target audience in the existing format and in the way it should be perfect. Such a description will help to understand the key changes that need to be made in the development and promotion of the product.
Step-by-step instructions for drawing up the image of a potential buyer
Having found the answers to all the above questions and armed with the necessary amount of information, you can begin to build a portrait of a potential client step by step. This plan is suitable even for those who do not yet have an established client base. In this case, the analysis can use the data of acquaintances who are most likely to be interested in your offer. And already when you have the first real buyers (at the first stage, it is enough to analyze the first 10 people), you will need to repeat the procedure. So let's get started:
- Viewing a profile on a social network. From such popular resources as Vkontakte or Facebook, it is very easy to get some information - gender, age and place of residence of a potential client. This is very necessary data that should be entered on a computer in a special plate.
- Analysis of pages and groups in which clients are members and subscribers. This information should also be entered in the previously created table. Why is this required? After the portrait of the target audience is drawn up, these pages and groups in social networks can be used as information platforms. This means advertising your product on saved pages.
- Three favorite sites. Having information about which resources customers most often use, you will be able to place your offer on them in the same way. It always works very effectively.
- Field of activity. This moment is also most often possiblelearn from the questionnaire, and the availability of such information allows you to understand the capabilities and needs of the consumer.
- Recording questions and concerns the client has. This will help “tie” your proposal to their decision.
- Designing a client's portrait based on the information received. All data are summarized in a separate questionnaire-table for each client. As a result, you will have a ready-made image of a potential buyer in your hands.
Working customer portrait examples
This is how well-composed TA images look like:
Audience for a family psychologist in private practice. An example of a consumer portrait in this case looks like this:
- Female people between the ages of 22 and 44 from major cities.
- They are interested in psychology and follow the news of groups on social networks on similar topics.
- Have at least 3 interests.
- Active sports.
- They are passionate about philosophy, spiritual values and personal growth.
- High or average earnings.
2. An example of a consumer portrait for an online youth clothing store from designers.
- Female and male people aged 20 to 35 from metropolitan areas and medium-sized cities.
- Interested in fashion and trends.
- Everyone has a stable job or is studying in higher education institutions, with active life beliefs.
- Doing several sports,participate in competitions, are members of relevant groups in social networks.
