Without a clear portrait of a potential client, it is impossible to correctly compile a commercial proposal for the sale of a product or service and it is even more difficult to correctly address it. A portrait of a potential buyer is the target audience, which is likely to be interested in your proposal. It is compiled using the maximum amount of information about consumer demand for a product.
Business segmentation
The topic is worth starting with the fact that there are two lines of business - b2b and b2c. The first option is business to business, and the second is for customers. In the first case, as a rule, the question of drawing up a portrait of the target audience is not worth it, since the audience is known to all, it remains only to concentrate on attracting customers. But the second case is what will be discussed later. For b2c, it’s always important to determine the right audience, regardless of whether it’s online business or offline.
In addition, it is important to know that the target audience for a certain activity may not be one. Experienced specialists always identify the main group and several minor ones for work.
Elements of a portrait of a potential client
Before proceeding to the instructions for drawing up a portrait of a consumer, it is necessary to understand the subtleties 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 customer, which will be focused on all marketing activities of your organization. A portrait of the target audience can have a huge number of diverse characteristics, because the more there are, the more truthful the image will be.
Basic positions for describing the target audience
Any marketer who first encountered the task of describing the target audience asks himself several questions:
- How to determine who is the target audience of the organization?
- In what period of strategy development is it necessary to choose CA?
- Where to get data for compiling a social portrait of a consumer?
- What are the characteristics for creating a customer image?
- How detailed is the description?
Of course, these are not all the issues, but, of course, the most basic ones. Next, we will analyze each of the items in more detail. So let's get started.
The target audience
It can be extensive - for example, all consumers of milk products, or narrow (only those who buy low-fat cottage cheese at a low cost). The wider this circle, the more fuzzy the description will be, since in this case it is difficult to determine the pronounced characteristics of the audience.
It is necessary to create a portrait of the target consumer based on the prototype of the most prominent representatives, trying to outline common characteristics that will distinguish your company’s customers from the rest of the market audience. When forming the image of your customer, it is necessary to describe not only regular customers, but also those who have not yet purchased the goods.
At what stage of the strategy do you need to choose CA?
It is necessary to start compiling a portrait of a consumer after analyzing and segmenting the market, that is, at the stage of developing a positioning strategy. In practice, quite often there are situations 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 do the following:
- Identify the main competitors of the company.
- Make a comparative analysis of your company's product and what competitors offer.
- Direct 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 the perfect buyer.
- Make an image of the target customer based on the data received.
Where to get information
In order to form the image of a potential consumer, it is necessary to answer some questions:
- Who buys the product and who does not?
- Why buy it or not buy it?
- What are the criteria for choosing how to buy and apply?
- How do consumers relate to the rest of the organization’s products?
- Application Experience.
The following sources will help you find answers to all these questions:
- Notes in specialized publications about the modern buyer.
- Thematic groups in different social networks (marketing and internet marketing).
- Existing customers, for example, from a point of sale offline. Ask them to take a short survey, ideally you can conduct a focus group.
- Own website where you can install special meters with traffic analytics.
- Wordstat (study of high-frequency and low-frequency keywords). The latter, by the way, will tell a lot of information about the portrait of Central Asia and their desires.
- Sales managers interacting with existing customers and suppliers (if the business already exists and operates). By the way, to control the work of employees, you can hire secret buyers.
- Non-competing enterprises, which, for example, are based in other cities, but are ready to share knowledge and experience about customers.
- Specialized analytic agencies. Maybe you are lucky and will be able to find a competent marketer who will completely take on the search for data for further compiling a portrait of Central Asia.
Characteristics for the description of CA
All the characteristics on the basis of which the customer’s image is formed can be divided into several groups.
Geography
Here you will need to establish the geographical area where the advertising message will be broadcast. Here it is necessary to determine in which part of the country / region / district potential customers live and are located. It makes no sense to advertise throughout the country when your product or service is delivered only in large cities, for example, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Socio-demographic indicator
It can be divided into three components:
- Client gender Representatives of the female and male sex are guided by different principles, respectively, and they make different decisions. Therefore, to compile a portrait of a consumer in marketing, you must first determine for whom the product is intended. Quite often it happens that it is suitable for both of them, respectively, the target audience is men and women.
- Buyers age. This is a fairly extensive block, since each advertising proposal 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 - these are 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 heyday of a career and its growth, retirement, retirement). It is precisely at these stages that one should be guided in drawing up a portrait of Central Asia, since each service or product has its own age category, to which they will be sold better.
- Education. This criterion helps to understand how the buyer is developed professionally. A lot of targeted advertising campaigns make their division according to it; it can be a split into those with one or more entities and an average income level. Most often, this example of a portrait of a consumer is used by organizations that offer goods and services for wealthy people.
Financial situation
One of the most important criteria when considering a customer’s image is to determine the income level of your target customers. It is important to understand what check you are counting on and what principles customers are guided by.
If potential buyers of goods have a low income, then setting a high cost on the goods is impractical. And also it is worthwhile to understand that people with low incomes pay great attention to the price, more precisely, the price is the key point for them when choosing an offer.
Information channels
This is one of the most important issues when creating a portrait of a potential consumer. Here it is necessary to establish from what specific sources your future customers receive information and answers to their questions. These can be completely different distribution channels:
- Search engines on the Internet.
- Social networks.
- Newspapers.
- Magazines and stuff.
If we consider online advertising, it is necessary to establish what kind of portals your customers visit, these can be sites of various directions, for example, of a narrow thematic focus.
If you are going to engage in attracting customers to the store on an Internet resource, then you should pay attention to specialized sites where people with the same intentions get together and discuss issues of concern to them. These same sites can subsequently be used for their advertising campaigns.
How detailed should you describe the CA
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 clear image should develop in a person’s head. Ideally, you need to add a collage of several photos to the description that will complement the portrait. It’s 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 more.
The picture will be complete and detailed, if during the creation process you try to describe the vector of CA development in the existing format and as it should be perfectly. Such a description will help to realize the key changes that need to be made in the development and promotion of the product.
Step-by-step instructions for creating an image of a potential buyer
Having found 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 customer base. In this case, when analyzing, you can use the data of friends who are most likely to be interested in your proposal. 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 a very necessary data that should be entered on a computer in a special plate.
- Analysis of pages and groups in which clients are composed and subscribed. This information should also be entered in the previously created table. Why is this required? After the portrait of Central Asia 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 of your favorite sites. With information on what resources are most often used by customers, you can just as well place your offer on them. It always works very efficiently.
- Field of activity. This point is also most often found in the questionnaire, and the availability of such information allows us to understand the possibilities and needs of the consumer.
- Record questions and problems that the client is facing. This will help to “tie up” your proposal to their solution.
- Making a portrait of a client 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 on hand.
Working consumer portrait examples
This is how competently composed images of Central Asia look like:
- Audience for a family psychologist practicing private practice. An example of a portrait of a consumer in this case is as follows:
- Female people aged 22 to 44 years from large cities.
- They are interested in psychology and follow the news of groups in social networks on similar topics.
- They have at least 3 interests.
- Actively involved in sports.
- They are fond of philosophy, spiritual values and personal growth.
- High or medium earnings.
2. An example of a portrait of a consumer for an online youth clothing store from designers.
- Male and female people aged 20 to 35 years from megacities and medium-sized cities.
- Interested in fashion and its trends.
- All have stable employment or study in higher educational institutions, with active life beliefs.
- They are fond of several sports, participate in competitions, are in the appropriate groups on social networks.