In the past we’ve covered how to create customer personas to assist with your online marketing efforts. One of the ways that customer personas are incredibly helpful is by using them to frame your unique value proposition (UVP). Your UVP is what makes your product or service unique and ultimately can help you close more sales than your competition when used to inform your online marketing efforts.
The information and insight that personas provide can be critical to getting the right message to the people you can help most. Here are seven different ways to use the customer personas you’ve created to facilitate the building or refining of your UVP.
1 – Deliver What They Need
Understanding your customer base through personas provides valuable insight on their needs throughout the sales cycle. Proactively meeting those needs as they arise will make you stand out from the competition and position yourself as the best choice when the time comes to close the sale.
After the sale, clients will appreciate your ability to anticipate their needs and provide exactly the right solution for their current challenges. This builds deeper customer relationships and provides the opportunity for additional ongoing sales.
2 – Answer Their Questions
An important component to building trust in your brand is providing credible information in your area of expertise. However, it’s often challenging to determine which questions are most important to your audience at any given time. And with the rising tide of content production online, it’s vital that your message be on point and valuable if it’s going to be seen at all.
Using personas as a guide can make it easier to deliver the right answers that meet the needs of the target audience you want to reach. You will be better in tune with what your potential customers and clients expect of you, and in turn you’ll be able to provide the answers they need to move forward.
3 – Fit Their Workflow
Even the best solutions can be ignored if they require a significant shift in routine. When your customer personas include information like job position or company size, it can be valuable to envision how your product or service will fit into the usual routine of doing business.
Being able to simplify existing processes without disrupting workflow or established practices is an advantage over the competition that wins buy-in throughout the company. As you frame your UVP, this can be an important factor in gaining more new business looking for improvements without drastic change.
4 – Solve the Big Problems
Getting people to understand the far-reaching benefits of working with you brings you one step closer to forging a business relationship with your best customers. What does the future look like for your best clients? How can you help them get there? If your product or service plays a major role in the big picture of your clients’ success, it’s essential to include that in your UVP.
Likewise, understanding your customers through the use of customer personas makes it easier to frame those big benefits into the language that your customers speak, which in turn helps you to articulate those benefits and close sales successfully.
5 – Solve the Little Problems
Little challenges can quickly add up to big headaches. Even if your product or service isn’t world-changing, you can certainly imagine scenarios when customers are happy that they chose you versus going without.
The “day in the life of” scenario of persona-building is particularly helpful in uncovering the little daily challenges that people often overlook when searching for a particular product or service to meet a need. When creating your UVP, pay particular attention to those problems that your company can alleviate that other companies can’t (or that other companies make worse).
6 – Relieve the (Real) Pain Points
Sometimes, issues that seem to be severe from your perspective may seem like just the cost of doing business to your clients and customers. By contrast, issues that appear minor to you may be a major setback to someone in your target audience.
When you are building out personas, listening to the frustrations that come up over and over again (even when minor) can give direct insight on which pain points are the worst. This in turn leads to a unique value proposition that puts the issues of the client first and foremost.
7 – Give Support on Their Terms
Great customer support is often invisible. It’s there when you need it, and unobtrusive when you don’t. Analyze customer support patterns for current customers and build this information into your overall customer persona when support is a high-value issue.
Putting your support expertise up front can give you an advantage over competitors that are less equipped and can ensure that your potential customers know that you’ll always be there when you need them.
Your Turn
What aspects of customer personas help you most in refining your UVP and online marketing? If you need help building the right message to reach your target audience, we can help. Contact us today and let’s discuss.
