Customer personas are a perfect tool to define how people see your brand, who your audience is, what they require from your products or services and what their expectations are.
What are customer personas?
Customer personas involve creating a single identity that acts as a catch-all for existing and potential customers who have shared traits, tendencies, and demographics.
For example: a software as a service (SAAS) organisation that provides expense tracking for hospitality venues will likely have different personas covering their target audiences.
With demographics from a single-person operation with high stress levels and a need for simplicity, to a large restaurant chain with a dedicated accounts person, higher cash flow and more legal accountabilities.
Every existing customer would then be segmented into as many personas as are needed, and in-depth values, insights, priorities and roadblocks would be assigned to each to help create a fuller picture of what the business can do to pre-empt certain factors and market based on others.
Read more: 5 Tips for Creating Outstanding Customer Experiences
How to create member personas
The main key to creating accurate and long-term-viable customer personas is to interview and talk to your current clients and stakeholders.
Go into the conversations with clear outcomes in mind, knowing the questions and data you need from each to help you identify the essential information for your personas.
Having an in-depth conversation with a customer is never a negative – you will be surprised at the number of insights they offer to you and your team, and the opportunities they provide.
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How to effectively use customer personas
Whether you’re looking for customer personas to help you research new product offerings, create content, or even alter internal processes, having data from your research optimises the process.
Personas allow you to make educated assumptions of customers and estimate how decisions are likely to affect them, as well as helping you identify the target audiences you should market to.
Marketing to different personas
When you’re trying to attract new clients and customers, knowing what attracted your current ones is an important first step.
With this data, you can start to create messaging that offers target audiences your services to help them solve existing issues, or create accurate lookalike audiences in search engine and social media marketing.
These are ever-refining steps and should be revisited regularly to help you spend your money in the right places.
