Understanding who your customers are — or should be — is critical in finding the right ones for your business. What motivates them? Who else in the marketplace are they comparing your business to? What keeps them up at night? Identifying and creating accurate buyer personas will open opportunity as the business grows.

Understanding who wants what as a customer, client or partner is critical in being successful in your digital efforts, across marketing, communications, and design. Call it user- or human-centered design; however you think of it, there's a trend in putting your customer (or user) at the center of the conversation of how you should interact with them.

Customer Analysis involves a wide variety of related activities and they all center on knowing more about who your customers are now and who they should be in the future. GRAYBOX is the objective third-party in helping you identify where the gaps are between who you're talking to you and who you should be talking to in the future. We are oftentimes engaged at the start of a website design project and/or marketing engagement to make sure we're starting from the same frame of reference as our client-partners before work begins.

It starts with goal-setting across our team and yours to determine how the trajectory of your business is going to impact the kinds of folks you want to be engaging online. Are you moving up-market? Launching new products? Entering new industries? All will impact what you say, how you look, and where you target your efforts.

Once we have a solid understanding of where your business is going, GRAYBOX leads a collaborate process to identify who your customers are and/or should be. Sometimes it's crystal-clear; often it's not and we facilitate a culling through a diversity of customer types or groups that may be similar to try and usually get 3-5 total personas that are clearly defined. Next, we poke at them to see how they hold up to the scrutiny of a series of questions that get at what makes them tick. We want to know their underlying motivations so we can see how well-defined they are and ensure that they service up actionable insights to drive decisions about targeted marketing and how to interact with them through your website.

The final step in the our customer analysis is research, including primary and secondary sources. There's no true alternative to speaking with your actual customers to get valuable insights from them, either qualitative through one-on-one interviews or quantitatively through targeted surveying. Most industries, though, have robust data sources we can leverage to gain insight into getting inside your customers' heads and enriching our buying personas.

At the end of the day, customer analysis and building personas should serve a singular purpose: give you better insights into who your customers are to be able to make actionable decisions into what, how, and when to invest in your digital efforts.