Understanding customer pains and gains can help you discover new revenue streams and will guide you in how to best market your brand.
Putting clients front and centre of your approach is about:
Prioritising your ideal customer
Empathising with their challenges
Delivering a consistent, differentiated client experience
Prioritising your ideal customer
I often work with clients to develop buyer, customer or client personas.
Accurate buyer personas are part data, part fiction – they are a representation of a business’s ideal purchaser and help target your marketing to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers.
More personal than client segmentation; buyer personas really enable marketing teams to picture who they are speaking to online, who they are creating events for, curating content for and who they are developing campaigns to appeal to.
Segmentation allows a brand to understand different sets or groups of customers. A buyer persona, on the other hand, allows brands to better understand these homogenous groups, and to recognise key traits within them.
- Econsultancy
When creating your buyer personas, you should include customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.
From Advocacy Amit and Otto the modern man, to Deborah the Facilities Manager and Tomas the CMO – buyer personas take a lot of effort to work through – but they are incredibly powerful.
Get in touch to discuss a buyer persona workshop or search for examples online. Then clear some room on the wall for Milly the early adopter or Clarence the time-poor CEO.
Empathising with customer challenges
Customers aren’t just sitting somewhere in a vacuum waiting to hear about your product or service
Building empathy between marketers and customers is important as it can reveal less tangible insights, such as obstacles throughout the customer journey and opportunities for communication.
Customers aren’t just sitting somewhere in a vacuum waiting to hear about your product or service – understanding this ensures your customer’s perspectives, wider concerns and influences are always considered.
There are a number of Customer Empathy Maps - see one example below from author and XPLANE founder, Dave Gray - but ultimately I see this as an extension of the buyer persona.
By considering customer pains, their gains, their to do list - you get a good idea of how to market your brand, how to articulate your proposition in their context, and may even uncover some new revenue streams.
Delivering a consistent, differentiated client experience
So, you know the customers and clients you are targeting, you’ve developed targeted messaging and tactics and demonstrated your understand, and can solve for, their challenges.
Now it is time to deliver on those promises.
The client experience (CX) equation is simply the sum of a client’s experience with the company for the duration of their relationship.
A CX strategy is a much more involved initiative than Buyer Personas and Empathy Mapping. It is a proactive effort to enhance every interaction with a client. From initial contact to sales, service and post-delivery.
It is an area marketers should lead and champion, but never go alone.
Download the Pink Mingo 9 step guide to CX for B2B, below
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