Creating client personas for your firm helps your firm win bigger and better clients, i.e. your ideal clients. This article covers how you start to build your client personas (marketing persona, or buyer persona), so you can improve the efficiency with which you attract in new clients to grow your firm.
What goes into your client personas?
A client persona represents a significant section of your target audience. The client personas (or buyer persona or marketing personas) you create will have answers to most of the following, and perhaps one or two other things that you find useful in your marketing.
- Name â what will you call this persona?
- Job title (how they name it, not you)
- Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
- Location: urban / suburban / rural
- Bottom line of their company (assuming they run one)
- Salary / household income (possibly different/ relevant)
- Family (involvement in their company etc.)
- Demographics (age, gender, education etc.)
- Their goals and challenges (much more than 'to build a business')
- Their main and secondary problems
- How you help solve these issues
- Their values and fears (lead to great pain points)
- Hobbies or interests
- Literacy: How do they work and learn?
- Where they get business advice and news
- How you help them
- Typical objections during sales process
- Marketing message: What is the most relevant 'elevator' pitch and surrounding phrases?
- Buying Motivation: What are their biggest reasons for buying your services and why you rather than your competition?
- Buying Concerns: What did they worry about when they initially signed you up, and how did you resolve those issues (others will likely feel the same, which can improve your on-boarding process too)
Where to get this information
The information for your client personas comes from a range of places. You'll need to be creative and use some of them in conjunction with others to create information, rather than data and learn more than you've fully learnt so far.
- Informational interviews: Real interviews, with clients, and potential clients. If your team also interact with them, what can your team add to these interviews?
- Social Media: Listening to the types of things you target audience ask, discuss and talk about (including the style they write their profiles in). If they don't use social media, that's also relevant!
- Your website: What pages and keywords are most used in your website? Your analytics can show keywords, what pages are most used (and for how long), helping to reveal what they are looking for and what interests them. Looking at where they come from, and possibly the medium they access the web with, can add more information. Google analytics can also reveal age and other information. These features are available, if turned on, in your Google analytics.
- Facebook insights: If you have a Facebook page for your firm, this can reveal a lot of information. Visit the insights that are linked to your page.
- Surveys: An electronic survey of clients (e.g. 'survey-monkey') can reveal data, and asking clients when they call. This isn't a deep informational interview, but gets categories of information that might otherwise get missed.
- Client database: What do you already know about them from your own CRM?
- Your and your team: What do you, and especially your team, already know about them
Why bother?
There are three great reasons for understanding your clients, what's more you shouldn't do all of the work in developing that understanding. Building the client personas can be a team building exercise in its own right.
- Client Personas help you get into character and communicate more effectively with prospective clients. You, and your team, can increase understanding of how your clients think, feel and behave
- The models can reveal opportunities for a different fee structure, or offering. You can become more relevant to your client's needs, by understanding where your service meets client needs.
- A Client persona can help align your whole team with your thinking, marketing and client service needs. Anything that unlocks the power of your team is worth considering carefully.
Read on! Have a look at  How to build and use your client persona