How to Create a Customer Persona for Your Business
A customer persona is a useful tool for personalising your marketing efforts by putting a human face to your target market. Even in online marketing, personalisation will help you create an appropriate message for your customer base. This includes paid ads in both search engines and social media.
A study showed that more than 50% of customers, mostly millennials, expect personalised marketing offers. Two out of three marketers, however, find personalised strategies as a challenging task.
Fortunately, this article has some tips that can provide you with valuable insights into creating and utilising customer personas in your digital marketing campaigns.
Contents
What is a customer persona?
It’s a model that describes your target buyer based on what your research has discovered. It is also known as:
- Buyer persona
- Audience persona
- Marketing persona
Make a profile of your ideal customer and craft a marketing message specifically directed at them. Make sure to apply the appropriate tone and address their particular needs and wants.
It’s also likely that different buyers will buy your products or services for various reasons. Therefore, it makes sense to have more than one customer or buyer persona. Each profile should include the necessary details, such as:
- Demographic or location
- Behaviours
- Buying patterns
- Goals
- Pains
- Desires
- Needs
It’s not possible to learn all your customers and leads individually. However, a buyer persona can represent each significant group of your target market. It will also help you picture your customers as real people. This will make it easier to gauge their needs and preferences in your marketing campaigns.
How can your business make use of customer personas?
The personas you create can enable you to write a message that will appeal to each of your target customer group.
To illustrate this, here’s an example. You share important messages and news to your relatives, friends, and colleagues. You’ll use different words and phrases to reach out and connect with a specific group. You send group messages to friends on FB’s messenger app. However, you don’t use FB to communicate with your parents. Instead, you call and talk to them on the phone. So knowing your customer personas makes it easier on finding means on how to reach out to every group.
Five steps in creating customer personas
Customer personas are only useful if they are based on real-world details and not on speculation. This means conducting thorough research which you can start by following these steps.
1. Conduct in-depth customer research
This is the first phase of your audience research.
- Who are currently buying your products or services? – Some of the primary data you need from your current buyers include age, activities, buying pattern, where they live, income and even language they used. If you’re maintaining some customers’ records, you can confirm most of the information you need. You can collect or supplement additional details through email or online surveys and interviews.
- Take a look at what your competitors are doing. – After collecting all the relevant details about your customers and leads, consider learning more from your competitors. Are you both reaching out to the same target market? Is there a buyer group that you haven’t targeted yet? Is there something worth learning from the competition? If so, how can you make your brand stand out?
2. Identify their pains and concerns
It pays to learn the problems or issues that your customers and leads want to resolve. What are the things that are holding them back from their goals or success? You can set up search tools to monitor what people say about your products online. It can help you understand why people love or hate your products. You’ll also be able to pinpoint which segment of the customer experience needs adjustment.
Don’t forget to ask your customer service team if you have one. They are in the best position to tell you what kind of questions people asked about your products or services.
3. Ascertain their goals
You need to learn if your products or services help people achieve their goals or solutions to their problems. Such goals can either be personal or professional. The critical thing is to know your customers’ motivation for using your product.
Your customers’ goals are probably connected with your specific product’s capability. However, even if they don’t, it can help you decide what type of marketing campaign to launch or what writing tone to use.
4. Establish how your brand can help them
You’ve painted a thorough knowledge of your customers’ needs and goals. Now it’s time to convince them how your product or service can help them. At this point, forget about extolling the features of your products, most people won’t care. Instead, focus on offering real benefits to your customers.
It can be a challenge for many marketers to change from feature mindset to offering benefits. This is one of the primary reasons for creating a customer persona. It makes it easier for marketers to propose products or services from the customers’ and leads’ viewpoint.
Remember, a feature is what your product does. Meanwhile, a benefit is how a product or service make’s one’s life more comfortable or better.
For every customer issue or goal you’ve listed down, answer one question – how can your product or service help? The answers you obtain will help you craft a powerful marketing message in the last step.
5. Use our research to create your customer personas
Once you’ve finished with the research, look and compare any common characteristics. As you organise and group the attributes, you have enough to form the basis for your customer personas.
For example, you’ve identified a specific group of people called millennials. Most are in their 40’s or below. In addition, many live in cities who like to hang out at places, such as Starbucks. Now you take in those various characteristics and transform them into an identifiable person you can talk and relate to.
Also, give the profile a name, job, address and other relevant information. Make sure that you’ve created a real-like person without having to delve into too many specifics. Also, remove any defining characteristics that have already been included in the group.
Based on the details mentioned above, you’re now ready to provide the representative characteristics that will turn your target market into real people. For instance, Joe:
- Is around 40 years old
- Is a millennial
- Lives in London
- Works at a marketing agency
- Likes to spend free time in Starbucks
Conclusion
Make sure to identify who your customer personas are. Once you have a face in mind, it becomes easier deciding the best course of action in your online marketing strategy. Also, create a bond with your buyers by providing them with solutions to their problems. In this case, how can they benefit from your products or services? Such an online strategy will both increase your sales and loyalty to your brand.
Creating customer personas will take time and skill. If you would prefer to leave this task to the expert, don’t hesitate to contact us at Springhill Marketing. We will provide you with the right buyer persona for your business and the best possible SEO strategy for boosting your online traffic and sales.
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