Why Does Your Business Need Customer Personas?

Customers personas are a useful tool in marketing – and one that your business should have to hand. They can be used in a variety of scenarios, from stakeholder presentations to marketing strategies. Find out exactly what one is, and why it’s important to your business, here:

What Is A Customer Persona?

A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a customer segmentation tool that combines data, market research, traditional demographics and informed assumptions to create a fictional representation of a brand’s audience. This is presented as a profile of the person and used by the business to guide things like marketing activity.

Why Does Your Business Need One?

Customer personas are important because they allow you to gear your marketing and business objectives specifically towards the challenges, motivations and opportunities of your audience. You may learn from your customer persona that your targeted audience segment displays typical shopping behaviours or responds to certain messaging, and interacts with certain brands. This would allow you to tailor your marketing towards those opportunities and use language that your audience will likely respond to. Or you may identify a unique challenge of that particular audience segment, which you can work to ensure your product solves.

By focusing on the challenges and pain-points of your customer persona, you can tailor the content, messaging and approaches that your business takes in marketing. By creating multiple personas you can also ensure that each audience type is catered for individually, making your efforts highly-targeted.

What Should Be Included In Your Customer Persona?

The more detailed your customer persona, the better! Get detailed with their story and give each persona a name, back story and more. A customer persona can be endless, but a few key points that can be included are:

• Education status
• Job title, industry and salary
• Where they live
• Age group
• Pain points when buying your product
• Typical device usage
• Brands they’re interested in
• Triggers to shop for your services
• Hobbies
• Aspirations
• Publications they read and media consumed
• How long they may take to make a purchase

This data can come from a variety of sources, including:

• Industry reports
• Consumer surveys and feedback
• Shopping habits
• Data from previous customers
• Google analytics data
• Educated assumptions
• Competitor research

Creating Multiple Buyer Profiles

Don’t forget that each persona represents a different segmentation of your customers. You can have multiple buyer personas, each one resulting in targeting at a varying customer type with unique messaging, approaches and advertising placements.

Think About Their Touchpoints

As well as thinking about who your customers are, think about how they interact with your brand. One of your older audience demographics may first become aware of your business through a brochure, before visiting your website. They may be looking to get a phone number and clear, concise information to make a purchase quickly and speak with your sales team directly. A younger audience demographic however may reach you first through social media. They may look to consume huge amounts of content, such as blogs, around your services and visit the website multiple times before enquiring via email. These two journeys are entirely different and make use of different touchpoints – something you should consider when analysing the purchase funnel.

Create Your Customer Persona Today

At Peaky Digital we can help create rich customer personas that will help your marketing strategies and creating a strong brand identity. To find out more get in touch with our team here!