- By: Mark Jakobsen
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Understanding your customer is the key to commercial success
With business, it’s all about the customer. With them, your business will thrive. Without them, well, you know.
To fully engage with them, understand them, and position yourself correctly to maximise sales and business opportunities, marketing has a trick up its sleeve. The customer persona.
What are customer personas?
In short, customer personas allows you to group similar customers into groups with defined traits. These groups allow you to better understand their motivations, behaviours, expectations, and needs.
Usually, a company will have a variety of different customer personas, as your overall target market can comprise a variety of groups. For example, if we look at exhibitions. Exhibitions will attract a range of people, each with a different goal for attending. If we just take visitors who attend, you can look at the different reasons for attending and build personas around them. So your list of personas could look something like this:
- Persona 1: To purchase from an exhibitor
- Persona 2: To research options on the market
- Persona 3: Catch up with colleagues, network with the industry
- Persona 4: Look out for career opportunities
There could be more, or the exhibition may have less, depending upon what they are about.
Each persona within this example will have different characteristics. For example, Persona 1 would have purchasing power, whereas Persona 4 definitely would not. Persona 4 could be younger in age than Persona 3. And so on.
So what this does, is give you a framework of the typical customer within each framework with which to work when it comes to planning your marketing campaign.
But we would like to emphasise that personas are fictional characters, based on real-life data and research. Each one represents a segment of your target audience.
Why should you bother with customer personas?
How you go about your marketing activities should have customer personas at the heart. As mentioned, personas allow you to understand the specific demographics of each group within your target market. You end up with a cheat sheet of their likes, dislikes, purchasing habits, where and how they get their industry information, and so on. All this information can then be used to ensure you create compelling, tailored messages that resonate with them. You can identify the features and benefits of your product of most interest, and focus on them in your marketing messages.
They will also allow you to understand what channels will be the most productive to get your messages to them. Some groups will prefer email over social media. Others will go to industry publications and websites.
How to go about creating your customer personas
First off, there is no one template that you need to follow. There are a variety to choose from, each with different customer attributes. How you structure yours will depend upon what is most important to you, your company, and the product you have. For example, if your company sells washing machines, you might like to include a household income section. Whereas if you provide project management software, that field really is irrelevant. Although, you may want to substitute it for purchasing responsibility or something similar.
To get your customer personas, you need data. There are several ways to achieve this, and the best is usually through a combination of data acquisition, customer surveys and interviews, market research, and customer analytics.
Through this, you will build a picture with the help of demographics and psychographics. These can include age, gender, location, interests, values, challenges, and aspirations. But alongside these, it is important to explore pain points and goals. Where your demographics and psychographics tell you who your customer is, the pain points and goals will highlight why they should purchase from you. It’s a powerful marriage when combined, as it gives you the platform to create effective messaging and know how to get the messaging in front of your customer.
Simple right!
Keep your personas fresh
Business is always evolving. Not only that, but your customer base will be evolving too. Because of these constantly changing market dynamics, you need to keep on top of your personas. You can keep on top of your personas by refreshing the customer data at regular intervals and realigning with your product.
Reaping the benefits
Customer personas are a key part of driving targeted marketing campaigns. They can lead to greater business success as they will allow you to uncover secrets about your customer you may not have known before. Or they may reinforce other aspects. Either way, what they do achieve is to allow you to better connect with your customers to maximise your business goals.
If you would like to discuss more about customer personas, thinking about undertaking the process, or just want a friendly chat about anything else marketing-related, reach out and get in contact.