Buyer Personas for Commercial Cleaning Companies
A persona is the character or “person” that you present to other people, your public image. A buyer persona is slightly different. It is a fictional character (or semi-fictional) created as a result of research and demographics; companies aim their marketing at this character. Larger companies may have many buyer personas as a result of subsets of categories of clients and potential clients.
However, smaller companies, like your commercial cleaning business, may market to only one, two, or three buyer personas. By the way, you may have read about buyer personas before; they are also sometimes called audience personas or marketing personas.
It's tempting to want to create buyer personas based on gut feelings, but that's not useful or effective. Even though the personas are characters with made-up names, they are only semi-fictional. They are composites of your target market or of your existing clients, and their characteristics should be based on careful research.
Why are buyer personas necessary?
There may be hundreds of people who own or operate businesses in your catchment area, each one of those people with different personalities, ages, preferences, and responsibilities. You can't possibly target each one of them individually; it doesn't make financial sense – and there aren't enough hours in the day.
Likewise, it isn't necessarily effective to lump all of these people together and market to them in a vague and general sense. In trying to appeal to everyone, you will often find that your lack of details and specifics means that you are unable to appeal to anyone.
What you can do is to use your market research to determine ways in which these business owners or property managers are similar so that you can do targeted marketing to a particular subset of people. Think of those in this subset as one semi-fictional entity and give him or her a descriptive name. Now you have created a buyer persona.
Can you give me an example?
The Janitorial Store has hundreds of helpful articles and videos to help you market your commercial cleaning business. For example, in Learn How to Market a Cleaning Business, Jean Hanson suggests finding your target market by following these steps:
- Find your most profitable customers.
- From the above group, identify those that refer.
- From that, even smaller groups include common demographic characteristics.
- Take the time now to understand the behavior that makes them ideal.
- Draw a fully developed biographical sketch to use as a marketing guide.
Look at #5 again: Does the “fully developed biographical sketch” sound familiar? Yes, that's your buyer persona.
Example #1:
Let's suppose that you have created a buyer persona that you are calling Cautious Carl. Your research of existing clients has given you enough information about Carl that you know he is 45 years old, has managed an office building for the past 5 years, is very private, and doesn't make decisions quickly. You will also know that he is frugal and hates spending money when he doesn't have to. His biggest fear is being taken for a fool.
Obviously, it's possible to have many more details than these, but you get the point. How would you market your cleaning business to Cautious Carl? You would be able to relate to his wants and needs specifically, perhaps by emphasizing customer referrals and highlighting how having a regular cleaning business can be a financially sound decision.
Example #2:
Perhaps after examining all of the attributes and demographic information of your current clients you have created another semi-fictional buyer persona called Busy Beyonce?. She owns several car dealerships in your town, and business is booming. You may have a list of several details about this character (she does love to sing, for example!), but the ones that you want to capitalize on are the fact that she feels overwhelmed by her volume of business, wishes she had more hours in the day and the fact that she's kind of a clean freak.
For this buyer persona, you would emphasize your cleaning company's track record of efficiency. Hopefully, you would be able to show her your customer testimonials attesting to the extreme cleanliness and systematic procedures your company is known for. You can sell her the gift of time.
Marketing to your target audience is essential as you operate and grow your business. It's how you will keep your current customers and attract new clients.
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