In order to create strong, relevant copy that connects and engages leads, understand how your potential customers are thinking about your product and how you can influence their thinking. In order to do that you need to understand who you are marketing to and how your product or services interact complement each person. One great way to do this is to create profiles to guide your marketing automation strategies. Keep reading to learn how to go about creating these profiles and how to get the most information out of them.

Identify Personas

The first thing to do to begin recognizing who your leads are and how they could potentially interact with your business is gather all relevant data you have about your leads and customers. Gather things like demographics, buying statistics, job titles and any other information that may be useful. Start organizing this data by either creating a spreadsheet and then grouping relevant information, or by using the somewhat more old school method of writing traits on post-it notes and creating affinity diagrams. Look for patterns and ask questions of yourself and each other of why certain traits are being grouped together. You can also use technology like lead grading to qualify your database. Here’s a small sales tool that can help you group, score and/or grade your database.

Hone Personas

Once you have some basic groupings defined, it’s time to dig into them and define the typical individual that represents this group, what they want and how your product can provide that. This process establishes your the ideal buyer. If you have a way to get in touch with an actual customer or lead who fits within one of the different groups, then approach them. You’ll gain valuable insight that may be hard to glean from simply comparing data sets. Identify whether your groups are too narrow or too broad, and combine or divide them accordingly. Once you feel comfortable with your groups, personalize them by creating a persona with a name and a story, and try to determine how your product or service can help them solve their problems.

Share Personas

Now that you have your personas established, named and their behavior and background defined, it is time to share your work with coworkers. Email your findings around the department, and put personas up on the wall so people have an opportunity to think about the people they are creating content or design features for. The goal is to ultimately come to a shared understanding within your team of who you are working to appeal to, and that shared understanding should influence all communication being sent to your leads.

When using this technique to create personas to guide your marketing automation, remember, it doesn’t stop at the creation of a persona that helps you understand your customers. Always continue to perform A/B testing to see how different groups react to different material, and don’t be afraid to tailor content to specific groups. To learn more about understanding how your customers view your marketing materials, visit Lead Liaison’s marketing automation blog online.