Top Tips for Creating an Effective Customer Persona
As a business owner, when planning your marketing strategies, it’s only natural to have a lot of creative ideas that you envision for your brand. While this kind of creativity fosters new, positive ventures, sometimes, your customer’s ideals and values can get lost in the process. One of the most effective ways I have seen this overcome is through creating a customer persona. Essentially, a customer persona allows you to identify your target market’s core needs and wants, based around their buying behaviors. These key identifiers then drive your campaigns as you work to establish features to help your particular customer achieve their desired outcomes.
Through providing a truly unique customer experience, you’re setting yourself apart from the competition and customers will begin to become loyal to your brand. Knowing your ideal customer and identifying how you’re best able to provide them with the value they deserve will only benefit your brand and (most importantly) your customer in the long run.
To help you get started, we’ve compiled our top tips for creating an effective customer persona.
First, what IS a customer persona?
Before we dive into some of our top tips, let’s take a closer look at what a customer persona is, in a nutshell. The customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, created using collected data through extensive research. This understanding of your customer is critical for content creation, product development, and retention. For example, a customer persona answers key questions such as who the target market is, what their likes and dislikes are, and what they value about your product/service. Careful analysis of this type of data allows your business to tailor your content and messaging to fit the customer’s specific needs. The number of customer personas you have, depends on your business, however, most have only one to two.
Collect your data
To form the most accurate customer persona for your business, begin by collecting customer data through surveys, focus groups, and research. Luckily, as technology continues to advance, there are more and more methods of data collection. One way to gather the data is by observing your current contact database and discovering trends on how your customers access your content and their response to your brand messaging. Interviewing customers over the phone or in-person would be extremely helpful to gain intimate insight that may be overlooked in generic survey answers—however, that’s not always possible. That’s why offering them convenient surveys and the option to be a part of focus groups is the most effective means of gathering data. Additionally, talking to your sales and financial teams will help answer questions as to, who’s buying what—the most. Once you’ve collected and validated the data, put it into a form that’s easy for you and your team(s) to understand and translate.
Speaking of collecting data…here’s some questions to ask as you build your customer persona…
To gain a proper perspective on what the customer wants from your brand, ask customers questions about their daily lives and buying habits. Ask these questions to as many customers as possible, to form a general customer persona as well as create segmented customer personas based on similarities. Start off by asking about their occupation and details about their role within a company and the skills they offer for that role. Next, ask what a typical day looks like for them and what type of industry they work in to get an understanding of the size of the company they work for and what type of revenue they are generating. Then, lead into asking about their goals for success and what their biggest challenges are to get them there. This will most likely lead into questions about personal demographics, educational background, and their future career path. Finally, look for feedback specifically about your brand—ask the customer questions related to your products/services and what they value the most and/or feel could be improved.
Identify the who, what, why and how
These are the four most important questions when filling in your customer persona’s basic demographic information.
WHO- To answer who the customer is, you’re going to use the data findings to personalize the market segment’s general customer background, demographics, and key characteristics/identifiers. Customer background would include things like careers and marital status, while demographics would include age, race, location, and other personal information. Additionally, other identifiers would include personality traits and buyer behavior.
WHAT-This is where you find out what the customer is hoping to gain from your business. What are their general goals, challenges, and solutions and how will you be a part of supporting them? Identifying their pain points, allows you to be an active part of the solution!
WHY-Determine first, why they may have these goals/challenges and furthermore, why they would be interested in relying on your brand to help support them. Dig deeper into the positive and negative impact your product or services have on their daily lives to determine how you can constantly improve the customer experience.
HOW- This is more of an internal question to ask your own team—how will you carry out the message in a positive and personal way? This is driven by marketing strategies specific to your customer persona(s). How will you target them with the right messaging at the right time? How will you motivate them?
Name that customer
Additional ideas to make your customer persona more tangible is to give each customer segment a specific name and treat them as much like a real person as possible (ie: Kelly is segment 1 while John is segment 2). Go the extra mile and even create a visual aid for your team to refer to and keep it visible in a general area so that your ideal customer and their needs are always at the forefront of strategy and planning. Have fun with it and realize that as you gather data, your ideal customer persona will be ever- evolving so always be on the lookout for new discoveries about your target market and be sure to communicate those across teams.