What is a Customer Persona?
A buyer persona is a way to segment your audiences and target your ideal client. Researching who your clients are helps you to identify marketing opportunities. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who embodies the characteristics of your best potential customers. You’ll give this customer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioural traits. You’ll understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. You can give them a face.
Your buyer persona will guide everything from product development to your brand voice to the social channels you use.
How Create a Customer Persona
Now’s the time to start building your persona. You can use a template to format your persona or use research, surveys, and interviews to identify your ideal customer. There are many templates out there you can use to format your persona, such as Xtensio.
Here’s how to craft a fictional customer that’s the perfect fit for your real-world brand.
1. Do thorough audience research
Ask yourself these questions: Who is your existing customer? Who are your social audiences? Who are your competitors targeting?
You can compile this audience data from your social media analytics, your customer database, and Google Analytics.
Make sure you understand which social channels your audience uses. Familiarize yourself with tools like Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch and Google Analytics, to find out where your audience spends most of their time online.
The more you understand your audiences, the better you can connect with your customers.
2. Identify customer goals and pain points
Pinpoint what’s troubling your customers in their personal or professional lives and communicate the benefits – tangible, emotional, and monetary – of using your product to help solve these pain points. Your sales team and customer support department are great ways to find answers to these questions, but another option is to engage in social listening and social media sentiment analysis. Show your customers that you care through active listening and timely and mindful responses.
3. Understand how you can help
Now that you understand your customers’ goals and struggles, it’s time to think about how you can help. Consider and analyze the benefits of your product or service and highlight their best attributes
Where are your followers in their buying journey? How can you help? We’re not robots, and relatability goes a long way, so be sure to humanize your customer persona. Remember, your customers are looking for the best fit for their needs. Understanding this will strengthen your relationships with clients.
4. Find out more about your current customers
The key to creating a perfect customer persona is to connect with your existing customer base. Conduct interviews, polls, and quizzes to identify and discover new information about your clients. This information helps a business understand what its audience prefers. Reach out to your clients through calls, emails, chats, and social media platforms for best results
5. Evaluate the information collected
After conducting a comprehensive research about the likes and dislikes of your clients, analyze the data to see whether there are any common concerns or points. Collecting similar responses from various clients helps you pinpoint an area you need to improve or a common issue that you can improve.
Select a Primary Persona
The final step of creating a perfect customer persona for your business is choosing three of four representative personas. These three personas should represent clients most likely to commit and engage with your brand. Identifying your loyal customer base will help you determine which audience to avoid and which one to approach when marketing.
Remember that the point of a customer’s persona is discovery! Allow yourself to learn new things about your business marketing efforts and uncover new possibilities. Once you’ve conducted your research and perfected your customer personas, you’ll develop a better understanding of your target market.
Do you have a question about your customer persona? Book a complimentary call and let’s chat about how to get started.
For more strategies on how to tackle your digital marketing, check our blog post 4 Types of Digital Marketing Strategies Your Business Needs.