It's official ! You have decided to start your own business. You may have already taken the steps, started your market research, found what you want to offer in terms of products or services. But knowing what you want to offer is one thing, knowing who you are offering it to is another matter!

We therefore offer you three working methods to help you understand who your target is and how to address them.

Personas: identifying your target

Understanding the consumer and defining an appropriate marketing and communication strategy means sending the right message to the right person. To achieve this, the first step is to define your ideal client.

An ideal customer is a fictional character who represents the typical portrait of your prospects. Ideally, you will need to write three personas, but the number can increase depending on the breadth of products/services your company offers.

The problem that entrepreneurs sometimes encounter, once they have defined their target, is to forget them as their business evolves. The advantage of Foglietto in this creation stage is that once your target is defined, you can maintain a coherent strategy throughout the development of your business.

You will therefore need to think about several pieces of information about your customer, which will make up the first part of their profile:

• His first name
• His age
• His job
• The social networks they use
• The channels and media they consult
• His interests and passions
• The place where they live
• His history
• Her goals

The more specific you are in the profile, the easier it will be for you to put yourself in their shoes and define the second part of their profile:

• Their purchasing motivations
• Its purchasing obstacles
• How they discovered your business
• The relationship they have with your company

Knowing all this information will allow you to understand what marketing and communication strategies to implement: the social networks on which to speak, the content of your blogs, the keywords to prioritize for your natural referencing, and so on.

💡 Cross-referencing the elements of different personas allows you to broaden your conclusions. For example, if several of them use the same social network, it may be interesting for your company to be present on it or to monitor it.

The empathy map: understanding your client

Being able to understand the situation and identify what your customer is feeling allows you to develop a better user experience with your target, and therefore to bring together a community. The empathy map method is also useful in terms of image, communication, or even after-sales service, for example.

The diagram created by Visual-mapping.fr is very telling and can help you understand this method. However, the empathy map can be difficult to approach and implement. We offer you another version here. More intuitive to implement, and easier to read, the empathy map made fromour foglietti will be more useful in the long term.

To set up your empathy map, you will need to, in order, define several points, all of which explore your customer's state of mind as well as what happens in their environment when they interact with them. your products or services.

1. The person: start by defining who your potential customer is. Summarize their situation and role. If you've already created your personas, you can reuse their profiles as a starting point.
2. What they need to do: what are their goals in life? What do they hope to change, what are they proud of? How will they know what their victories are and what their failures are?
3. What they see: what do they encounter in their daily life? Which people or activities? What are the people around them doing? What do they read, what videos do they see? Everything has an influence on his perception.
4. What they say: what does the customer say when they see your products/services? Is that what they really think? Is he making innuendoes? Or do they talk about it? A bar, a park, a supermarket? The atmosphere is not the same, the influence necessarily differs.
5. What they do: What does the potential customer do when they discover your business? Are they looking for it voluntarily? Does he see an advertisement in the street when going to meet a friend? Is he with a loved one who recommends it to him? And when they receive the product or service, what do they do? Their perception of your company will not be the same if they are at that moment with an enthusiastic friend or alone and sullen.
6. What they hear: you must take into account what the customer hears, from the moment they discover your product or service. Whether it's a mention of your company on social media, the people around them when they unwrap a package, the music they hear when they eat your pastry, or even the way employees talk to each other during a performance.

Once these external elements have been determined, you will need to try to understand the internal elements of your prospect.

• What they think and what they feel → Their problems, their fears, their frustrations, their obstacles? → His hopes, his dreams, his goals? → What other thoughts could influence his behavior?

All these questions must be adapted according to your business. If you are a human resources firm, the questions to ask will not be the same as if you are a vegan candy brand.

If we take our persona created above, who is looking for noise-cancelling headphones, the diagram could be as follows:

By constantly keeping these elements in mind, you will be able to put yourself in your prospect's place and therefore create a climate of kindness and trust that will be beneficial to everyone.

The customer journey: the journey of the customer

Understanding and knowing your customer is essential for a long-lasting business. Drawing up a map of your customer journey will allow you to analyze and understand the behavior and feelings of your prospect and will allow you to optimize their purchasing experience, from their first search to the recommendation of your products/services to of his loved ones.

This step presents two difficulties: The first is its fixed aspect. When you create your customer journey, it is based on your personas, so it is a matter of guesswork. But in reality, a customer journey is not fixed. It changes and adapts. The second difficulty is the multiple nature of the customer journey. Because in reality there is not just one, thousands are possible, because each prospect is unique and will have its own path to you. In this respect, Foglietto files are an important asset, whether when creating a business or in the long term. Each step, that is to say each interaction with the prospect, differs depending on the person, is bound to broaden and deepen. Foglietto therefore allows you to modulate your customer journey according to your observations and therefore adapt your strategies .

To create your customer journey, you will first need to take one of your personas and their empathy map and use this to create a scenario. What they do on a daily basis as well as the problem they encounter that could lead them to find your business. You then create your table. Here too, there are dozens of possible options, so we opted for an intuitive format.

As in the diagram below, draw your table and place your persona sheets outside your boxes.

You must now fill in the row and column titles. The diagram at the bottom of this step allows you to have a clearer vision of the usefulness of the customer journey.

• The second column represents discovery, that is to say the stage where your customer becomes aware of your company or your products/services.
• The third column is for reflection. It is during this stage that the customer will, for example, compare several products, visit the website, request a quote, etc.
• The fourth column is for purchasing. This is when the customer chooses their product, selects their payment method, or even enters a discount code.
• The fifth column concerns handling. This is the moment when the customer receives their product or service, or whether or not they decide to keep it, for example.
• The last column is for promotion. This is the moment when your customer recommends your product. This could be a share on social networks or simply a review on Google.

Next, you need to fill in the first column.

• The first line concerns actions, these are the examples we gave above: asking friends for help, searching online.
• The second line designates the touchpoints, that is to say each click or call that will be made.
• The third is used to evaluate the prospect's emotions as they progress. for example, they will be delighted to easily find the item corresponding to what they want during discovery, but unhappy during the payment stage, because the site does not support all credit cards .
• The fourth line will list the difficulties that may be encountered at each stage. It could be too many clicks to get to the checkout stage or communication issues.
• The last line is used to resolve these difficulties by proposing avenues for improvement.

Finally, the last step is to place your cards on the diagram, as in the table below.

For example, in the actions box of the “Discovery” phase, this can be with a search online, on social networks, on television, by friends… the possibilities are vast and depend on the company you are looking for. create, it is therefore interesting to use your personas to help you get started. The points of contact in the purchasing phase for an e-commerce site will be the addition of items to the basket, perhaps the addition of a promotional code, the choice of a payment method, and and so on.

💡Using the foglietti to-do list will allow you to precisely detail each action and not neglect any step.

All these steps serve to lead us to difficulties and solutions. The more detailed you are about actions, touchpoints and emotions, the more effective you will be in the final step. Taking the time to do a detailed customer journey will save you time in the long run. Whether it is defining your marketing strategy, choosing a suitable site or even in terms of loyalty.

You can use different colored cards for different customer journeys. The ideal is to create a customer journey by persona.

You can also keep the color code defined when searching for your ideal client. Pink corresponds to your personas, yellow to their background and green to the conclusions to be drawn from them.

As you can see, the ideal customer, the empathy map and the customer journey complement each other. Implemented when creating a business with Foglietto, they will allow you to know and understand who your future customers are and will become pillars of your business strategy.