Why are customer personas important?
A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing or prospective customers. It is a method commonly used in marketing and sales strategies to better understand and target specific customer segments.
They can be used in several ways to enhance your marketing efforts:
Targeted messaging
Personas help you tailor your marketing messages to specific customer segments. By understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points, you can create content that resonates with them and addresses their unique challenges.
Improved product development
Personas provide insights into what features or solutions your target customers are looking for. This information can guide product development efforts and help you create offerings that align with their requirements.
Enhanced customer experience
By understanding the behaviours and preferences of your personas, you can optimize the customer journey, personalize interactions, and deliver a more satisfying experience at each touchpoint. For example when designing a website or developing online tools, it’s a good idea to conduct some research on how users navigate your website.
Effective marketing channels
Personas help you identify the most relevant marketing channels for reaching your target audience. You can prioritize your efforts and resources on the platforms or channels that your personas are most likely to engage with.
What are the steps involved in persona development?
It can take some time to develop customer personas because everyone’s time is precious! You’ll need to enlist the help of Sales and other Account Managers to identify suitable candidates to interview. It’s also important to try and recruit candidates who aren’t currently customers - finding potential customers will give you an unbiased response to your questions. The following are the typical steps taken to develop your personas:
Research: Collect data through surveys, interviews, and market research to gather information about your existing or potential customers. Explore demographics, psychographics, buying behaviours, motivations, goals, challenges, and try to gather information about sources of reference they trust.
Identify patterns: Look for commonalities and patterns among your customers' characteristics and behaviours. Group them into distinct segments that share similar traits.
Create persona profiles: Based on the patterns identified, create fictional profiles that represent each customer segment. Give each persona a name, photo (if possible), and provide a detailed description of their background, demographics, preferences, goals, pain points, and motivations.
Validate and refine: Share the persona profiles with your team members and stakeholders. Gather feedback and refine the personas to ensure accuracy and relevance.
What questions and information should you gather?
When preparing the questions you are going to ask your candidates, think about what the information is going to be used for. The insights you need for developing your content strategy, will be different to those required for developing your website. It may also vary depending on your business and industry, but here are some common elements to consider:
Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, education, job title, etc.
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, attitudes, personality traits, etc.
Goals and challenges: What are their objectives, both personal and professional? What are the obstacles they face in achieving those goals?
Buying behaviour: How do they research products or services? Where do they typically make purchases? What influences their buying decisions?
Role and responsibility: What role do they play in the buying process? Are they a key decision maker or just an influencer?
Communication preferences: Which channels do they prefer for receiving information? Do they prefer email, social media, phone calls, or in-person interactions?
Remember, customer personas are not set in stone. They should be regularly validated and refined as you gather more data and insights about your target audience.