I think finding your beachhead market is the most important thing you can do. Even more so than having a minimum viable product. If we have an MVP and an established Target Market/Customer, we can develop the appropriate personas that we believe are correct. I like to use a persona or even a scenario type structure in the early stages of a start-up or a launch. It provides better clarity and focus in moving a plan forward. When you do by markets you tend to generalize more or make broader assumptions. I would rather adjust because of too much focus versus adjusting because too little focus. It is also cheaper this way if that has any relevance.
A Marketing Segment/Persona can be created many different ways. The point is not to make it elaborate, just capture what we know. After you develop the personas, put realistic and some not so realistic objectives to each persona, key account, or market segment. After that and only after that can the idea of channels be addressed and pricing for that matter. Most people develop pricing before ever figuring what channels they are going to use and determine what the cost of acquiring a customer is.
Your initial effort for a persona can be this easy:
- Create a Target and Current State:
- Give some thought to the ideal customer/user that you are anxious to move towards. Think of answering Who do you want your customer to be? What problem/gain will you solve for them?
- Give some thought to the person you would call tomorrow if you had to put groceries on the table this week. What event (trigger) would have happened for them to need your product/service? This can sometimes just be a description of current customers and prospects. I often time just clip the top of the LinkedIn profiles of people to make a vision board out of the process.
- This is the Gap that sales & marketing must overcome.
- Give some thought to the ideal customer/user that you are anxious to move towards. Think of answering Who do you want your customer to be? What problem/gain will you solve for them?
Next, after viewing that ever so slight gap, I just proposed, start looking at the difference the jobs that your product/service will be used following the outline below.
- Instead of thinking about product and the features and technological superiority define our offering by customer needs or the job that it will do for them.
- Think about not only the job that the product will do but which customers are the unhappiest with their present solution. Opportunity is based on how important is the problem worth solving and how satisfied they are with present solution.
- Think of how we will articulate value = benefits relative to price.
- (Direction + or -) (the unit of measure) (outcome desired)
- Minimize (direction) the time (unit of measure) it takes to change a tire (outcome desired). This is an example of how we can determine value. The more relevant this is to the person/Organization/market we are addressing determines the success of our marketing.
- Think of how we will educate our customer along their journey. This will help us determine the marketing content that we need and the best way we can construct it. Very few times will we engage with a decision maker initially nor do we want to. We want to find the path of least resistance.
Now, we have reached our current state persona and our future state. Now ask, who could Joe introduce you to that would bring you one step closer to having a conversation with Bill, your future state?