As we go deeper into what has been coined ‘the information age’ the power of tech companies is on the rise. Almost every modern household has internet access and most include more than one person with a smartphone. This means that whether you’re an ISP or app developers, the potential customers for your tech company are vast. However, marketing to yourself and marketing to your target audience are two very different things. You already understand your product and why your company is special.
Your marketing goal is to convey that to the distributors and end users who need your services. Not sure where to start? One of the tried and true marketing techniques is to create a marketing persona for each group of people you’d like to share your products with.
What is a Marketing Persona?
A marketing persona is a semi-fictional character who represents a lot of very real potential customers based on analytics data and personal experience. They are, in fact, a way for you to clearly visualize who you’d like to sell your tech services to in a personal way rather than trying to target a large theoretical group. This gives you someone to understand who has real personal interests and concerns that align with many of the people you’d like to sell to. To create one, you literally give them a name, appearance, and sometimes personal things like hobbies or family lives if it somehow relates to marketing your product. If your company sells home security systems, for instance, it’s reasonable to have a marketing persona with children to protect.
Distributor and End User Personas
Most marketing teams that use the marketing persona technique don’t stop at just one. After all, your product probably isn’t so niche that only a single kind of person would buy it. For a tech company especially, you will want at least two personas, one for distributors who will buy your product in bulk to sell to their clients, and one for end users who will buy directly from you. Let’s say for the sake of examples that your tech company makes high-quality virus scanning software. Your two primary types of customer are security services that set up IT security suites for other companies and individual end-users protecting their personal computers.
When targeting your distributor clients, you’ll want to think of them both as to how the company feels about things and who you’re actually going to be dealing with like technology officers, IT managers, or a representative specifically assigned to work with you. This means your buyer persona should include both company and personal motivations. Individual customers, on the other hand, make choices on their own rather than falling back on the values of an organization and should be appealed to as technicians making decisions for their own equipment and working environment.
Building Your Personas
Your marketing personas are constructed with a collection of details that are true about a large portion of your potential customers and can be summarized in a series of questions that you might ask them. They should be given humanizing but representative names to help you remember and relate to them. For example, your distributor and end-user persona names could be something like Security Stan and Careful Carol. To build your personas, research and find the answers to important targeting questions that will help you design future marketing campaigns:
- Who is your target audience?
- Stan is a network security admin who works for an IT services company and could include your product in a package he sells to other businesses.
- Carol is a freelance web developer who needs to secure her personal PC and laptop
- What do they want?
- Stan wants the latest in virus protection software that he can manage remotely from his admin dashboard.
- Carol wants a reliable virus scanner that will keep her personal projects safe from data loss
- What do they care most about?
- Stan needs a product he can guarantee to his clients that will never break down or become inaccessible to his remote IT support.
- Carol is afraid of losing an important project to ransomware or a worm virus
Using Your Personas
Once you have built a comprehensive persona for each of your major customer types, it’s time to start talking to them. In many ways, this is like a combination of a research project and script writing. For everything the marketing team wants to know about potential campaign choices, it’s important to run these decisions by the values held by your marketing personas. Ask yourself which of the persona’s motivations to buy your product does each promotional asset appeal to and how they would respond to what you want to implement. If you’re not sure about the answer from the persona itself, dive a little deeper into research to see how customers of that type have responded to things in the past. The more data you use for a marketing persona, the more information about your audience can be gained by them.
Whether you’re startup building your brand or an old established firm, if you’re interested in more information about successfully marketing your tech company, contact us today!
