This concept may be one that you’ve already realised for yourself, but I’ve found that sometimes businesses with more complex target persons haven’t quite thought of their marketing in this way.
It’s really important to be considering who exactly is your target person, not just the person who has the problem your business is solving…
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Your customer may not be your Target Person.
In this video I have explained a very simple concept – one that most people get straight away. It’s that the target person that I talk about in Step One: Understand Your Target Person may not be the person you’re actually selling your product or service to.
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This is a really, really simple concept and most people are a bit like, “Of course!” as soon as they hear it, but sometimes people haven’t quite thought of it this way.
Make Sure Your Target Person is Defined Correctly
The first step in the Content-Led Marketing Strategy, which is how everything is structured on this blog and on my YouTube channel, the first step is Understanding Your Target Person. And a lot of the time the Target Person is a customer, you know the person that they’re serving, the problem that they’re solving, but sometimes it’s not.
The fundamental thing you need to understand here is that your Target Person is the person who decides to buy your product or service, not the person who benefits from your product and service.
And this is a really important distinction, especially in service industries. The person who’s benefiting from your service is quite often not the person who’s going to open the wallet and decide to pay you for the thing you do.
An Example: Grow To School
Let me illustrate it with an example. One of my clients, Grow to School, serves schools. They go into schools, they teach teachers how to take their regular curriculum classes and do them outside, in any outside space. And this isn’t like PE outside, it’s doing history or geography or whatever outside.
Now, they have multiple people that are important in their business. The first, the obvious one is the children, right. And understanding the wants, needs and fears and frustrations of the children is really important in their business. But the teachers are the ones who are going to have to be doing this thing – so they’re quite important because, while they care about what the children’s wants and needs and fears and frustrations are, they have their own wants, needs, fears and frustrations in relation to that.
Neither the teacher nor the children are the target person in this case.
The target person for Grow to School, is the headmaster or the business manager in the school. The person who makes the decision to employ them to help the school do these things.
They obviously need to speak to the teachers, they need to make sure that how they’re communicating makes teachers inspired to take them on and feel that they have this, you know, enormous amount of experience in doing this, so that they can genuinely help them. But the target person that’s really important for their marketing activity is that headmaster, the one who is making the decision.
This is the case in a lot of businesses so it’s really not quite as simple often as the person your product is solving the problem for is not always the person that you’re targeting your marketing to. It is important to make that distinction.
I hope this has helped you understand that distinction and maybe considered whether you need to refine your Target Person and refine your content a little bit more so that it’s a little bit stronger in selling your product.
If you need any help with it at all if you just want to be a sounding board or if you need any actual help with strategising and creating this Target Person profile, feel free to get in touch. I can send you templates, I can walk you through them, just let me know and I’ll see how I can help you.