Creating your ideal customer profile is an important step in developing your marketing plan. It helps you develop your strategy for finding your customers and how you are going to market to them. For planning the content that you are creating, and the medium you are going to deliver it, I am going to recommend using what you learned about your ideal customers and using it in a mental exercise.
After creating your customer profile the next step is to actually visualize your customer’s day. Here are a few questions to help you along:
- What emails are waiting for them in their inbox in the morning?
- What is their ONE Thing for the day?
- What do they need to learn in order to accomplish their ONE Thing?
- When during their day are they going to have time to learn?
- What obstacles stand in front of them?
If your target customer is a sales executive at a major organization then her day might start with getting ready for work, getting the kids breakfast, and dropping them off at school before she even starts her work day. She gets to the office and has a few fires waiting in her inbox that need her immediate attention. A couple of those emails lead to scheduling some calls and before she knows it it is almost lunch time and she has not got started on her ONE Thing let alone had time to read any blog articles or ebooks.
Based on all of that this busy sales executive does not have a lot of time to consume content. Maybe she can squeeze in a podcast in the car on the way to the office after dropping her kids off. Or, she could read a blog post while having lunch at her desk. If she does end up seeking out content it will like be very practical in nature and that will help her accomplish whatever her task at hand is. A short how-to guide, an implementation checklist, or some sort of template would all be things that will make her day better by saving her time and moving her closer to her goal for the day.
This comes back to the truth that you cannot spend too much time getting to know your customers. Not only does talking with your customers shapes your product but it provides you the opportunity to learn exactly what kind of content will provide value to them.