Note: This article includes a companion Sample Buyer Persona for you to follow along.
Last month, in my never-ending quest to help more marketers figure out how to do market research more in their organizations, I wrote an article describing how to write a buyer persona during the Corona Era. It shared some great ideas to make buyer personas work now – as in, now, during this world-shifting pandemic – like using surveys to gather more accurate information about your audience.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE REPORT!
Taking my own advice, I decided to design my own market research survey and put it into the field, so I can build a better buyer persona for my own business as a Market Research Partner for agencies and marketing teams as well.
Last week, I published a full report from that survey, which includes insights into how marketers everywhere currently think about brand awareness, business moving forward, and how to do market research to make the most of their marketing.
Now I’m wrapping up this project with one more market research tool for marketers everywhere – a sample buyer persona, and step-by-step guide to show you how I wrote it!
I’ve designed this article to be helpful for marketers. Using the following ideas and steps, along with following along with a free copy of the S2 Research Sample Buyer Persona, any marketer can create a survey themselves, define insights from the results, and pull it all together into a meaningful buyer persona to help guide their marketing moving forward.
Before we get started…
Please be aware, this article makes reference to the completed Sample Buyer Persona, and I definitely encourage you follow along with that report! You can download a free copy by using the button below!
What is a buyer persona?
Real fast, and before we go any further, if you don’t yet know what a buyer persona is in marketing, we need to get you caught up!
A buyer persona is the short, detailed story about your ‘perfect’ audience member. It’s a narrative that paints a picture of who that person is, what matters most to them, what keeps them up at night, and how they feel about you and your services within that mix.
Why do we use buyer personas in marketing? Because they take the insights we know about our audience, and converts them into something real that can help move our marketing to have greater meaning with our audience.
Here’s an example:
Which character do you think you could reach better through your marketing? “Intergalactic farmers seeking adventure” or “Luke Skywalker”? For anyone who’s seen Star Wars, you should realize two things from that question:
Luke Skywalker is an intergalactic farmer seeking adventure.
Based on those descriptions, Luke Skywalker would be the audience that marketing could reach better.
Why is that? Why can marketers map out a more meaningful marketing strategy for Luke Skywalker, as opposed to intergalactic farmers? Because marketers know Luke Skywalker. They’ve seen his story, grown up with his feelings, pains and emotions, and feel they can relate to this character much more than a basic description of his job and goals.
For those not in the know, Luke Skywalker is the main character from the original Star Wars trilogy.
Stories matter in marketing.
Most marketers already know this truth, but humans respond well to stories. That truth comes through in great marketing every day, and it’s just as true in developing a quality buyer persona.
As marketers, it’s up to us to create the most insightful story about our perfect audience member. The result will end up guiding our marketing.
Never forget, if you’re creating an ad for your audience, you’re going to do a much better job reaching Luke Skywalker v. a generic intergalactic farmer.
Why use surveys for buyer personas?
There’s many methods for writing incredible buyer personas to enhance your marketing strategy, and several are incredible for reaching your target audience. And most of them don’t require surveys!
Check this one out!
Stormie Andrews is a master at Buyer Personas, and his new book is going to take that to the next level. Be sure to keep this one on your radar!
Hubspot even offers a completely free Buyer Persona tool that’s super helpful in producing a strong buyer persona for your marketing. It works just like an mad lib, and is excellent if you’ve never gone down this marketing methodological path before.
All of these methods and tools, though, require something major: a deep knowledge of the audience. Which brings me to a major point of this article.
Why do I recommend using surveys to write a buyer persona now? Well, surveys help you understand things you don’t currently know. And right now, there’s a whole lot we don’t know about our audiences.
We’re currently living in a truly unprecedented time, and everyone and every business is dealing with it in a different way.
When writing most buyer personas, marketers are encouraged to use their knowledge of their audience, highlighting the pain-points and value insights they’ve harnessed over the years, to map out the final product.
In other instances, when it’s more difficult to define insight about the audience, we can even use secondary research as well.
But right now, no one really knows how their audience is thinking, and very little data exists to shed light on the challenge.
Conducting a survey of your audience right now can help you figure out how your audience is thinking during this crazy Covid catastrophe – about their business, about the future, and even about your products or services.
We live in a weird time.
The reality of the present is that marketers are at their lowest knowledge-point for how their audience is thinking and feeling. Sure, they probably have an idea, but to really define insights for a true New Normal marketing strategy, you need to get into the head of your audience and extract the answers directly from the source.
Basically, right now, surveys are the tool for the job! Which is exactly what I used for this buyer persona project!
How to Write a Buyer Persona (The Step-by-Step Guide).
Now that we’ve had plenty of lead-in, let’s dive into the real step-by-step guide I’ve mapped out for your survey-based buyer persona strategy.
The following steps all make reference to the Sample Buyer Persona developed for this article. Be sure to download a copy and follow along!
Ready? Cool! Because let’s dive in!
Step 1: Define Your Perfect Customer.
To start, no buyer persona works without having a good idea of who your perfect customer truly is. Which is why the process really begins by being sure you know exactly who you want to better understand and define.
In this marketing exercise, what we’re doing is mentally mapping the most ‘right’ client for your business. They have the budget, the interest, and the means to integrate your products or services into their lives. Their current challenge is merely that they need you and your marketing to move them to action.
For me, I’m a market research partner working with marketing firms and teams. I conduct market research when an in-house market researcher isn’t available. And because a very large portion of my current and future client base falls into that ‘marketing firm’ category, that’s who I defined for this projects as my perfect customer.
So, with that perfect customer in mind, I set out to understand as much as I could about agency marketers!
Step 2: Write Your Survey.
Consider how your survey question will translate into an output format you can understand. Then, imagine how you’ll make clear sense from the market research insights in that output.
Setting out to write a survey can be tricky, but with the right focus any marketer can utilize survey tools to perfect their quest in becoming an expert in how to do market research!
Start by mapping out exactly what you want to know – specifically, questions to answers about their perceptions of the future and current pain-points that pertain to your business.
Using a Word Doc or Excel, begin to formulate survey-style questions around the big “what’s” you want to answer.
Be sure the response types you get will be something you and your team can analyze and understand when it’s all said and done. This means don’t go overboard with complex matrices, complex scoring, or long-winded open-ended questions if you’re reaching out to a large audience.
Next, take out the red pen, because we’re going into edit mode. Really take a hard look at the questions you want answered, and ask which ones you can eliminate. More than likely, you’ve developed quite a long survey at this point, and we need to remember that most of what we’re trying to learn needs to be done in five minutes or less (or it’s free…bad pizza joke!).
Start by eliminating redundancies, meaning any questions you probably already know the answers to. From there, see where you might have leading questions or questions that can be combined, and find ways to edit, condense and eliminate wherever possible.
Take time to examine what can stay and what can go, and work to get your survey as short as possible.
Finally, you’ll want to build the survey out in a survey software to maximize collection. I used Qualtrics for this project, but also recommend trying SurveyMonkey or even Google Forms depending on the size and complexity of your project!
Click here to review the Buyer Persona Survey that was used in this project!
Step 3: Find Your Audience…and Get Them to Take Your Survey.
Of course, surveys are nothing without responses, and it’s time now for you to ask your target audience to participate in your study.
For some marketers, this will mean coordinating with a survey panel provider to reach a more robust audience. For many, though, the process of gathering responses can be as simple as reaching out to your contacts list.
Start by mapping out the optimum strategy for your timeframe and budget. Consider using email and social media, and even try incentivizing your audience with a drawing.
Reach out to your audience, collect the data, and you’re ready to go with the next step in your buyer persona process!
Step 4: Decipher What It Means.
I used agency-specific insights from p. 3 of the report to find insights for the buyer persona. Next, I combined them into a single cohesive thought to include in the final product.
“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina
All the survey information in the world means nothing without understanding, and this is the point in the process where we make sense of the madness in our own survey data.
It’s time to analyze!
Now, analysis can be a tricky thing to describe, which is why the first step I took in publishing the findings from this project was to write up a full analysis of the dataset.
To get started, we’re going to filter down our data.
Ensure the information you’re looking at is as relevant to the specific audience that falls into your perfect customer category, because you might have caught a few outside respondents that can mess with your results.
For this Sample Buyer Persona project, my survey collected data from both in-house and agency marketers. As the buyer persona we’re discussing today is only based on agency marketers, we only looked at Section II of the report for buyer persona data, which detailed response summaries from Marketing Firm team members only.
Next, we want to create meaning from the data.
Insights from the marketing firms and agencies section of the report was compiled into single thoughts, to better describe the ideas from the data.
Now, this might sound tricky, but it’s actually rather simple with most survey tools, as well as Excel and even PowerPoint!
Begin by building simple charts based around each of the questions you asked in your survey. In most cases a bar chart works great, or if you asked questions on a number scale you can take an average too!
If you had open-ended questions in your survey, spend time reviewing the responses and making notes. If this sounds tedious, several tools exist to help you make sense of your qualitative information too. For this survey project, I did not include the open-ended responses in the final report, but did use them to validate some of the conclusions I drew.
Finally, you’ll want to make sense of your findings.
Review the results and see what jumps out at you. Then, write it down, and see if you can find any other data in the analysis that backs up your theories. Take a look at an example in the image.
Note: I’m a writer, and since we’re writing a buyer persona I thought I’d save time by making sense through writing. That said, you can find your own methods, like brainstorming with team members or even doodling conclusions on a piece of paper. Find a method of making it all make sense that works for you!
Take the time to organize your thoughts into a cohesive analysis, and you’ll have a great understanding of what your survey is telling you about your audience.
Step 5: Give Your Persona a Backstory.
We’re going to table our survey analysis for a moment, and start to build out who exactly the character of our buyer persona is.
Begin by giving your character a name.
Remember, at the end of the day, a great buyer persona is a story about your perfect customer. And like a story, it highlights how the character thinks and feels, and paints a picture of the challenges they face.
Bottom line, you can’t get there without a name. Never forget Luke Skywalker.
In my Sample Buyer Persona, you’ll see I’ve named my character Karla. I chose this because it’s an amalgamation of several clients I’ve worked with over the years, and that gives me a smile every time I think about it.
Thanks to a step as simple as just naming my persona Karla, whenever I think about any execution in my own brand’s marketing, I specifically asked myself how Karla will think of it. For marketers who have never taken the opportunity to approach their marketing this way, believe me, it’s powerful!
I suggest you think of a name for your persona that has some meaning to you as well. Something you find clever but real as well. Go with a common name you’ve heard among your customers.
If you have an approximate age of your audience, I also often suggest counting backwards from the current year and looking at popular baby names from the year your audience was born.
Next, expand on your character’s background.
As you can see in the Sample Buyer Persona, I’ve also built out some more obvious characteristics, like Karla’s job, and also her age. This might sound redundant, but consider this:
Think about two family members, one younger than you and one older. Do you communicate with them the same, or different?
If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘different’, and the same is true for your marketing. Bottom line, if you have a better idea of who your audience is – including age, gender, career, etc. – you’re going to have a better idea of how to tailor your marketing message to make it work!
Finally, give your character a history.
You might know what your perfect customer does for a living, but until you’ve built that into a real backstory, the thoughts are just those. Taking the time to jot down a short paragraph or two, including how your character got to the current situation, what she hopes to achieve and what’s stopping her at the moment, makes it real.
Take a look at my example about Karla. Both her ‘Background’ and ‘Current Situation’ come from an amalgamation of real-world examples of agency clients I’ve worked with. In these sections, we define how she built her business, give some ideas for the amount of resources she might have available to invest in new services, and also what she’s concerned about looking toward the future.
Think about a movie or great book. Unless we see the character born, we usually jump right into the middle of someone’s life, meaning we don’t know anything about the individual at all. Yet through great storytelling, usually in the opening acts, manages to deliver that backstory in a concise yet intriguing method. From that point forward, we’re familiar with the character, so we can better envision how they’re going to interact with the elements in the rest of the story.
Buyer personas are no different. This background-building component is a vital part of great storytelling, and it’s going to be a critical factor in helping you put your buyer persona to work as you start to figure out how to do market research for your own marketing team!
Step 6: Write About Your Character.
Looking back over at your survey analysis, you probably have a mountain of notes. Now, it’s time to reframe them to be about Karla.
Start by defining the major buckets of her brain that matter to your marketing.
You want to hone in on major pain points, think and feel factors, and also any perceptions she might have about your products or services.
For this project, I focused on three major buckets of thought.
Coronavirus. Bottom line, I want to know how she’s thinking about the future, for herself, her business and her clients.
Her Business. Karla runs a business, and has different trains of thought for how she’s going to keep that business moving forward. I want to know what those are!
Market Research. My goal is to partner with agencies to help them do market research. Economics teaches us we need demand for that to work, which is why I want to know Karla’s perceptions of market research in her industry.
In a Word Doc, I wrote these three buckets as headings, and proceeded to write.
Next, edit, condense, and rewrite your notes.
More than likely, you have much more information than will fit in the one to two-page document we’re trying to create. It’s also probably not written like a compelling story about Karla.
Take your notes, and ‘squish’ them together through the power of editing. Rewrite everything you created into chunks that are more specific to Karla, like a sentence about how she feels about her business, or a paragraph about her perceptions of her clients in the future.
Take the time to do this for all your notes, and be aware of any redundancies that might come up. If a point has already been stated, there’s no reason to state it again.
As you edit, move your restructured thoughts into their buckets.
Karla’s major-theme thoughts are the outline of my story, just as the buckets you define will be the outline of your buyer persona as well.
Move your revised thoughts into their appropriate areas, and continue to edit, condense and weave together thoughts and ideas into descriptive sentences and paragraphs.
Next, write a story.
You’re almost there, but this is actually the point in the process where you’ll want to spend the most time.
With loosely-defined story points already crafted, it’s up to you to find the narrative throughout.
Begin from where you left-off in your Background and Situation, and leap into your first bucket. For me, this was asking the question “How does Karla think about the future?” and then answering it.
It turns out this worked great thanks to the lead-in I’d built out in my Current Situation section. Remember, if your writing doesn’t flow right away, change it!
I proceeded to answer the question by painting a picture of Karla’s days lately, and moving through to the next question and the next.
Along the way, I was sure to include worries, concerns, goals and influences wherever I had them, all in order to paint a detailed picture of the character I’m creating.
Backup your insights with other information.
Many buyer persona projects advocate for building the project from your own deep information. I’m a huge fan of this method – obviously advocating for using surveys now to gain deeper insights intra-Corona – and want to make sure it gets its share in this methodology as well.
You likely have some deep insider information about your main customers, and can use that background to help string together the web of ideas that’s part of your story. Use real examples from your client interactions, and start to decide how your persona would really feel in each situation.
What’s that? You don’t know some of the answers to tie things together, even with your insider information? In that case, take advantage of other data sources as well!
In my persona, I wanted to look deeper into how Karla felt about market research overall. Fortunately, I had some additional data on this topic from a different survey I’d conducted earlier this year. Click here to read more about the Apr. 2020 Survey of Marketers
Thanks to some great insights defined in that report, I was able to build in a more robust idea of Karla’s key perceptions of my main market research services.
Finally, give it a read.
When you really feel great about the story you’ve pieced together, and after you’ve had a chance to remove yourself from the project for a moment, find a comfortable place and take the time to read through your persona.
Give the reading the same attention you would a great book or important memo, but let your mind be critical as well. Feel free to grab that red pen once more and mark any areas you feel aren’t clear, misleading, or go down a path that doesn’t resolve.
Feel free to edit again and again, but don’t stop until you come away from this read-through exercise feeling great about your final product.
It might sound tedious and repetitive, but the final emphasis on true perfection is what’s going to separate your finished buyer persona from being just another piece of paper in your team’s dusty marketing plan.
Optional step, add a layout.
I go back and forth on this step, but wanted to make sure I addressed it here.
For the purpose of inspiring creativity, I love the power of a clean piece of white paper covered in minimal descriptive text and nothing more. In most cases, this is the buyer persona deliverable I give to creative teams at ad agencies; just the facts, organized to maximize inspiration.
But what about taking it a step further? We’re talking about a great story, and many great stories involve illustration, layout and more.
For many marketing teams, adding in a depiction of your character, along with colors that tie into your brand for even deeper connection to your marketing, will add an additional spark of realism.
Book Recommendation!
Want to get better a copywriting? Then this is the book for you! Cashvertising is one of my favorite reads about the power of psychology and how it works with words. Be sure to check it out!
Even with a more animated example like we see in the Sample Buyer Persona, when your team has a better collective idea of who Karla really is and what she looks like, the cohesion of ideas works that much better.
Which method is right for your team? Play around with it! I always write buyer personas in a Word Doc before going to layout, giving me both options to try out when it comes to the final product.
Step 7: Let Your Buyer Persona Guide Your Marketing.
The entire point of the buyer persona is to be a guiding force for your marketing strategy.
Take the time to review your persona in depth, and make sure the rest of your marketing team does the same. From there, revisit your current marketing strategy – from tactics, to creative, to copy, and more – and make sure it aligns with what you truly think of Karla now.
Does a certain piece of copy hit the wrong pain paints? Change it!
Does a digital retargeting strategy ignore key social networks Karla’s using? Add them!
Is there an extra step in her buyer’s journey that your marketing is ignoring? Patch it!
It’s important to remember the value of the Buyer Persona. It can easily become a pivotal marketing tool, or a piece of paper in the junk drawer. Meanwhile, some of the biggest brands on the planet are making really great marketing strategies by incorporating this next-level market research in marketing mentality.
Tips for writing a story from survey data.
I love to write, and I love to write about data. I also know that not everyone’s in the same boat.
So, before we wrap up, I wanted to address a few of the more technical points pertaining to the above guide.
Take a look at a few critical ideas to keep in mind when deciphering survey results into a written buyer persona.
Convert split data points into differing opinions from outside sources.
You’ll notice throughout my Sample Buyer Persona that I mention Karla’s friends and colleagues. If you compare this to the data, you’ll see that what I’ve done is wrap up disagreements between the audience using outside influences.
In the first paragraph of the “How She Thinks About the Future” section, we see that Karla wants life to return to normal right away, but is hesitant because of her friends’ concerns. This coincides with the data for this question, which saw that the majority of agency owners wanted life to return to normal, while a substantially smaller (but still meaningful) share of the audience is not ready at all.
I’ve had tremendous success with this method for reconciling differing opinions in datasets. While we know how the majority of the audience feels, knowing that another portion might feel otherwise, and demonstrating that reality through outside influence, helps copywriters, creatives, marketers and more prepare for additional perception hurdles that might creep up throughout the campaign.
Don’t forget the emotions.
Like any great character story, we want to know how the person is feeling. What concerns them? How does that make them feel? What will they do next as a result?
You might need to use your imagination a little here, but I’ll often argue that this is the crux of crafting a compelling chronicle of your character to cultivate creativity.
At each twist and turn, be sure to touch on the emotions that play into Karla’s mind. You’ll see this throughout each of my sections, where I highlight when Karla is stressed, concerned, anxious and more.
As you take your buyer persona into your marketing, use those emotional touchpoints as opportunities to engage and move your audience with even more meaningful marketing executions.
Consider adding media.
I opted not to include a media strategy in my buyer persona, but often you’ll want to include this important piece as well.
To accomplish this feat, be sure to build basic lifestyle questions into your survey. You can also gather information from media trade publications or online tools.
Adding a robust outline of how your character spends her time will help give a stronger strategic push in where and how you execute your marketing tactics.
Keep it short.
I cannot stress this enough, the shorter the better. As a rule, buyer personas I work with are no more than two pages, and only one if I can help it.
Let’s face it, humans have a short attention span. And marketers even shorter. Add on never-ending pressures of “I need this now!”…well, you get the picture.
Likewise, some of the most impactful messages in marketing have been told through conscientious conciseness in copy. Remember, there’s power in short, well-worded messages.
To make something that resonates with the audience for your buyer persona – the marketing team who’ll be reading and using it – you need to keep it short and sweet.
As you write, never hesitate to continue to squish and edit. With clever copywriting, you can get any point across through an extremely eloquent amount of brevity.
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein
Make your marketing the story.
Writing a buyer persona and don’t know where to start?
Message me for a free consultation! I’d love to help!
You’ll notice in my persona, just like in yours, that your story doesn’t have a conclusion. In fact, it’s really not much a story at all.
When you reflect on the finished buyer persona, it should become apparent that it’s really only Act 1 of your story. It’s the character development and conflict set-up phase. It’s the backstory on Luke Skywalker, but it doesn’t go much further than Tatooine in A New Hope. It explores the who and the what that will give your story meat, and stops about there.
The reason for this? Well, it’s because your marketing is the story!
The Buyer Persona is a story, yes, but in the sense that it’s the first few chapters of a much more epic tale. A tale of passion and emotion, of challenges and solutions, and of perseverance and action.
That might sound dramatic, but it’s actually the core of marketing. Once you know who your audience is, as well as how they think and feel and what challenges you can help them solve, it’s up to your marketing to complete the tale.
How will your customer become aware of you?
How will they become interested in your products and services?
How will they engage with you the first time? The second? The third?
What will the story look like, for them to go all the way from their current situation to your most adoring fan?
Answering these questions will be the absolute foundation for your marketing strategy. And while this might sound like Marketing 101, the takeaway from all of this is that you can tell a much, much better story, when you have a phenomenal first chapter. That’s your Buyer Persona!
Personas on personas on personas.
Before we wrap up, I wanted to make sure to address the elephant in the room. That is, what happens when we have multiple ‘perfect’ customers?
I mentioned it earlier, but I actually work with two main groups of marketers; in-house and agency. And while this project was geared toward agency marketers, I have a full separate data-set for in-house marketers as well.
Remember, if you have multiple audiences, they probably have different feelings and emotions about your products and services, as well as the world at large. For this reason, to really reach my in-house marketing clients as well, I’d want to create a completely separate buyer persona for that second audience, based on that additional data set.
So the question, then, is when do you stop making personas? After all, with enough thought, I’m sure we could all come up with a million different potential client types that we’d want to reach.
Well, like most things in this world, I always suggest questioning if the juice is worth the squeeze. In this case, we’re talking about market segmentation, where we decide not only what types of audiences are worth diving deep into, but also the size and potential total impact of each audience segment.
Bottom line, you want to create personas and define audiences, until you’ve maximized your reach with the audiences that really will have meaning on your own bottom line.
Click here to learn more about market segmentation in marketing.
Create your buyer persona!
Well, what are you waiting for? Now that you’ve had a chance to review the power of buyer personas, and seen a how I created my own, it’s up to you to get out there and put one together for your own marketing!
By the way, if you do end up creating a buyer persona for your marketing, I’d love to hear how it goes! Using buyer personas as a tool in your marketing strategy is one of the foundational elements of how to do market research in marketing. The process truly enhances the psychological connection your team has to the audience and the work, and that inherently makes it all better.
Give buyer personas a go, and especially during the Coronavirus era, be sure to consider creating a survey to grab even deeper insights about your audience.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I can’t wait to hear how it goes for your marketing team!
Did you get a chance to download the Sample Buyer Persona that accompanies this article? If not, be sure to grab a free copy!
For even faster access, I’ve also included a text version of the Sample Buyer Persona below.
S2 Research Buyer Persona
Name: Karla
Occupation: Marketing Agency Owner
Age: 50
Location: Anywhere, USA
Background: Karla owns a mid-size marketing firm, specializing in advertising design and placement, digital marketing, public relations, grassroots and overall marketing strategy for a range of local and regional B2B and B2C clients. She‘s grown her business over the past 15 years through hard work and building strong relationships, and now employs more than a dozen team members. She has a growing roster of raving-fan clients, with the majority paying a regular ongoing retainer fee between $5k and $15k per month for the firm’s marketing services.
Current Situation: Like the rest of the world, Karla wants to figure out how to navigate business following the Coronavirus shift. Over the past few months, she’s had clients put their work on hold, while others kept going with vastly different strategies. Meanwhile, her staff spent two months working from home. They’re just now getting back into the office on a part-time basis.
With all the changes, and surely more to come, she feels uncertain – and that makes her stressed.
How she thinks about the future: Karla spends a lot of time lately thinking about what might happen over the next year. She wants life to return to normal right away, but gets hesitant sometimes because of friends’ and colleagues’ concerns.
When she thinks about the worst, sometimes she worries that returning to anything ‘normal’ might never happen. She doesn’t know what that means for her business, and her brain often seeks new solutions.
Of course the firm needs clients to run, and she thinks about the situations of those clients often. She’s pretty sure most of her contacts want to return to normal life, but at a slower pace than her. But from conversations, she definitely feels like everyone wants to get their businesses back out there, and her plan now is to be ready to help them with their marketing when they are.
How she thinks about her business: Karla knows that marketing services will be in high demand as soon as her clients are ready to move forward – though when that is, she’s not sure – and wants to use that need to fuel the gears for her firm’s primary services.
She wants to attract new clients throughout this ordeal, and believes a big part of growing her business in that direction is through brand awareness. Following that train of thought, she spends a lot of time mapping out a marketing campaign to promote her firm.
That said, she’s more focused on getting the gears spinning for her current clients first.
She’s pretty sure that’s what’s going to allow her to keep the doors open and the lights on, which in the current climate is a major priority and genuine concern for her.
How she thinks about market research: If you ask Karla about market research, she’ll say she considers it extremely valuable for marketing, especially when it comes to navigating the marketplace over the next year. She knows audiences are changing, and sees market research as a way of understanding those changes.
Unfortunately, Karla admits she doesn’t know enough about market research to really make it profitable for her business. Her firm doesn’t have an in-house market researcher, and when a project does call for research, she or her team end up conducting it themselves. She knows more can be done, but isn’t fully sure what those research next-steps entail.
That, combined with her current focus on selling existing services over new, and a hesitation to charge clients more than normal moving forward, means adding market research services is not a huge a priority at the moment.
To Be Continued…In Your Marketing!
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