In The Old Days You Knew Who Your Customers Were
Because you met them – in person!
They came into your store and you were able to interact with them.
Immediately you would know their gender, roughly how old they were. You could surmise all kinds of information about them just by how they looked.
But even better, you could talk to them directly about what it is that they are looking for. “Are you looking for a widget? Wonderful! I have them in all different sizes and colors.”…
But what about visitors to your website? What do you know about them? Are they men, women. Are they young, old? Are they happy, sad, or just bored? And, does any of this matter?
The short answer is yes, it does matter.
If you want to interact with a visitor to your website in some way (and why would you have a website if you didn’t?) then it is vital to know who you are interacting with.
Know Thy Visitor
We can get all kinds of information these days from website analytics. Information such as what pages someone visited, how long they stayed on a specific page and your website etc.
But although you get to know what someone did when they visited your website, you don’t get to know who they are – you don’t get to actually see and interact with your visitor. And if you don’t get to see them you may make the mistake of imagining who they are.
Someone once reminded me that ‘you are not your customer’. I repeat that to myself often as it really helps to keep things in perspective.
Just because I know how to tie a reef knot behind my back, does not mean visitors to my website can do the same (or would even be interested in doing so…).
If we are lacking information as to who are customers are, then we tend to assume that they are like us, and very often they may not be the case at all.
On the other hand, if you know your customer you can tailor your language, the look and feel of your site, and even your product or service to meet their needs. And really, the goal is to meet your visitors’ needs.
One way to know your customer is to create a Customer (also known as buyer, or visitor) Persona.
A Customer Persona is a fictional character you create to represent your customer. This is would be your ideal customer. Someone who would visit your website and interact with it in the way that you want them to.
How to create a Customer Persona
How do you come up with a your ideal Customer Persona? Well, what you don’t do is simply create one from your imagination (wouldn’t it be nice if we could manufacture our customers…). What we want to do is get as much information from our customers, visitors to our website, etc. as we can.
In other words, the persona is created from facts you find out about your customers.
If you can create a customer persona, then you can interact with visitors to your website as though you were talking to this person. It gives you a mental image of who you are talking to.
A simple exercise is to find out some basic information about your customers:
- How old are they
- Are they predominantly a certain gender?
- What is their income?
- What are their likes and dislikes?
And the most important question, what problem do they have that you are trying to help them solve.
This is just a partial list, and would be different depending on what your goal with your website is.
Once you know some basic information, you can tailor your website, and all marketing material, to your customer.
How do you find out who your customers are so that you can create a persona?
The simplest way is to ask them. There are a number of ways you can do this.
- If someone contacts you, for any reason, you now have an opportunity to interact with them. Find out what you can about them (without being intrusive of course).
- Create a customer feedback form on your website that people can use to ask you questions, or to give you feedback on how you are doing.
- Send out a questionnaire to your email list. People are generally willing to give you feedback if you ask.
Any chance you have to communicate with your customer gives you the opportunity to find out more about them, and that will ultimately help you to better serve them.
If you want to take this further, the nice folks over at Hubspot have created a free template to create a customer persona that you can download from here.
Recap And Action Steps
When creating a website we tend to rely on our own interests and tastes when making design decisions. But there is a good chance that visitors to your website have completely different interests and tastes than you do.
In the past we could ask people what they wanted, what their interests were, what we could do better to serve our customers’ needs. When creating a web based business, a good exercise is to create a Customer Persona. And to do that we need to find out who are customers are.
Create a form on your website to get feedback, send out an email – ask your customers what they want – how you can help. The goal is not to be intrusive, but to find out how we can best serve our customers. And the best way to do that is to find out who they are.
And with that I will ask you – do you know who your customers are? Do you know if you are serving their needs?
- Do you know who your customers are?
- Do you know if you are serving their needs?
