I know that I talk a lot about target customers.
We do it all the time at GBW.
For each of our clients we need to know the target customer for our clients. That target customer is the target reader for the blogs.
Knowing who the target reader is makes the job of the writer much easier. You have to try to get inside that person’s head and think about the questions they have so you can provide the answers with blog posts.
I have read in a few places that some feel that having a customer persona isn’t important. I think it’s very important not only for what we do at GBW, but for just about every business.
Our writers use the target customer to help them make decisions. And I think knowing the target customer helps anyone at a business that makes customer-related decisions at a business.
B2B Target Customers
One little bump in the road when it comes to target customers is the B2B target customer.
A business selling to another business could define their target customer as that business.
For example, an email service provider like MailChimp might say they target small businesses with less than 50 employees that make less than $5 million per year.
I have no idea if that is their target customer, but you get the idea.
This is valuable information. It’s useful for people in the providing business. They can make decisions based on that information.
But B2B’s are tasked with taking target customer a step further.
Once you have an idea of the business that you’re targeting you have to figure out the person in that business that you’ll be targeting.
The Person Within The Business
This works well if you think like a salesperson.
The salesperson needs to know the type of business they’re selling to. That’s the first step. They can then identify the list of companies that they can approach to start the selling process.
But the next step is for the salesperson to figure out the person they should build a relationship at the businesses they approach.
For some the target will be the founder or CEO of the company. In other situations the target might be a manager or the IT or marketing director.
This is an important step even if you’re not in sales.
If you’re in marketing you need to know who the target person is at the businesses you target. For us at GBW, an article we write would probably be different if we were targeting the IT director versus the CEO. And there could be a number of different things we do from the topic to how in-depth it goes to the sources we use.
Better Target Customer = Better Business Decisions
And that brings us to the final point.
Whether you’re writing articles, selling or making product decisions or whatever – you make better business decisions when you know the person you’re targeting.
And really the “business” information you include can fall under the “person” information. You can say that your target customer is the CEO of a small business doing under $5 million sales along with all the other information you add to the persona.
And it’s also okay to tweak and modify the approach over time. I think as your business ages you’ll learn more about who your best customer is and you can make slight changes to the persona over time.
You don’t want to lurch around from one target to a completely different target. That will cause confusion and will lead to poor business decisions.
But the more you learn about your customer the more information you can add to your persona.
It will help everyone in your business to make better business decisions.