Trust is an indispensable element in sales. Leads need to trust your company before they can be converted into customers. Most companies’ marketing efforts are ways to build prospective customers’ trust in them. To build trust with your target persona, you have to understand exactly who your customers are and what their problems, challenges, and opportunities are related to your products or services. Only then can you find common ground to build trust. Identifying and creating a target persona is one of the most efficient ways you can lay the foundation for trust. Read on to learn how you can use target personas to establish trust between you and your ideal customers. What Is a Target Persona? A target persona is your company’s ideal prospect and customer. These are the companies that you are trying to attract with your marketing efforts. But don’t confuse the target persona with the target audience. The target audience involves age, gender, social class, and location. And though the audience is an important component, a target persona digs deeper into your ideal customer’s psyche. A target persona is a fictional character who represents your ideal customers. When describing the target persona, we also consider their psychographic data, including their behaviors, personality traits, and lifestyles. Consider their buying habits, hobbies, interests, and even their influences. For B2B companies, a target persona identifies specific roles and pain points experienced within a company. Your target persona is most likely a decision-maker who is, therefore, still a person. One of the most often overlooked or even forgotten requirements for a solid persona is making sure to include their pain points and needs, their problems and challenges in the context of their role in their company. 4 Advantages Of Having A Target Persona A target persona helps businesses see and relate to their customers as real humans. Seeing customers as humans helps you understand them and their purchasing decisions better and therefore helps you develop an effective marketing strategy. The outcome is a personalized campaign that attracts your prospects’ attention and brings value to them and your customers. Used properly, a well-developed persona should become the foundation of your marketing efforts. 1. Gain A Better Understanding Of Your Ideal Customer Establishing a target persona forces your team to sit down and think about your ideal customer. As opposed to relying solely on data about certain demographics, you gain a deeper understanding of their preferences, behavior, and more. Gain insights by surveying your existing customers or interviewing some of them. Ask questions like why they chose you over competitors, what problems or challenges your company has helped them solve, and what benefits they have received from engaging with your business. You should use this deeper understanding of your ideal customer to inform your decisions on the content, format, and platforms you use for your marketing. Doing so will help to attract your target persona during the stages of the buyer’s journey and build trust that will help your sales team close more deals. Pro Tip: Seeking feedback from customers is also a great way to identify potential customer success stories that can be developed and utilized in marketing. 2. Humanize Your Content A target persona will help you identify the best language to use to humanize your sales and marketing messages and content. Using language—vocabulary, keywords, acronyms, and buzz words—that your target persona does not use or understand would only result in alienating them. On the contrary, using language that they use daily (and using it right) would help humanize and personalize your content in the eyes of your prospective customers. 3. Better Market Segmentation Knowing your target persona will help you with market segmentation. With better market segmentation, you can produce targeted content in the optimal communication channels. As a result, you will naturally attract the right prospects and build stronger, long-term relationships. 4. Cost-efficient And Effective Campaigns An established target persona can help you create an effective marketing and sales campaign the first time, so you don’t need to invest more resources to get it right. You could also use your target persona to ramp up an existing campaign and turn it into one that will build trust and convert your prospects into customers. 5 Ways To Establish Trust When you have established your target personas, the next major step is getting them to trust you. They need to see you as a company they can trust to help solve their problems and meet their needs. Trust is the foundation of any customer relationship. Here are 5 ways your sales team can utilize your target persona to build trust. 1. Keep In Touch There are numerous channels to keep in touch with your target personas nowadays. Knowing which platform your target personas use will help you prioritize marketing channels to reach and communicate with your persona. For B2B companies, you may find they are more active on LinkedIn or Twitter or that they prefer email. Personalize your content to the marketing channel your personas spend their time in. Keep in touch with them through the right channels and share relevant content, tips, articles, guides, white papers, success stories, and events. 2. Make Them Feel Comfortable One of the best ways to establish trust is by making the target persona comfortable with you by speaking their language. Just as different generations use different lingo, different companies, and industries may do so, too. But you also want to zero in on the problems and challenges they face in their job role that are relevant to your products and services and help them solve them. This will help position your company as an authority that understands what they need and as a company that helps them meet those needs. 3. Speak About And Build Relationships With Top Influencers Who are the experts and thought leaders in your target persona’s industry today? Chances are your target persona follows and looks to them for trends and recommendations. Connecting with these influencers and referencing relevant things they’ve shared will help establish your company as being “in the know”, and as a credible source of information and solutions. Start by being active on social media and finding the people with huge followings. Follow them, interact with them, and develop a relationship with them. Once these thought leaders and experts start to trust your company, that will echo through to your target personas. 4. Pivot Your Content Marketing Target personas provide a more specific and realistic target for your content. Use your target persona as the starting point for planning your content marketing—what are their needs and pain points throughout the customer journey? Doing so will give you a clear idea of the best way to position your product or service as a solution for the customer’s needs. Your team will better understand the type of content that will appeal to your prospective customers. Learn what media formats your persona prefers to consume content through…articles, guides, white papers, webinars, instructional videos, infographics, etc. Then think like a publisher and prioritize the media types you should need to create and publish content in. When you produce and share helpful, problem-solving content that’s relevant to your persona and your products and services, you build trust and become the industry expert your persona will want to buy from. 5. Conduct And Share Surveys Numbers never lie, as the saying goes. Conducting industry research surveys and sharing them with your customers is an effective way to establish your credibility and authority within the industry. This can establish your company as a business that understands industry trends and customers’ opinions. Be sure to focus on topics and statistics your target persona will find helpful and interesting. Conclusion Identifying your target persona opens up a door with a plethora of benefits for your company. Building trust takes time and resources, but as you can see, it applies to a wide range of marketing and sales efforts. Creating valuable content and gaining your prospects’ trust will become so much easier when you know who they are.
