Real Estate Rachel. Manager Mark. CEO Cate. Florist Fynn. Whether you are in marketing, sales, products, or services, buyer personas help us all hone in on the ideal customer we’re trying to attract. These semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer are based on market research and real data about your existing customers. These personas should include customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
A detailed buyer persona will provide tremendous structure and insight for your company. They can help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, drive content creation, and influence sales follow-up. These personas help you relate to your customers as real humans. As a result, your business will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers. Don’t assume that you already know your audience. Take the time to create a detailed buyer persona for your business and see how these customer personas help your business grow.
Why are Customer Personas so Important to Your Business?
Customer, or buyer, personas help you understand your customers better. This makes it easier for you to tailor your offerings to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of various persona groups. A persona can tell you where your demographic spends time online, what resources they trust, and what pain points they are facing. You may know that one of your target buyers are caregivers, but do you know what their specific needs and interests are? If you want a full understanding of what makes your best customers tick, it’s critical to develop detailed personas for your business.
Depending on your business, you could have as few as two personas or as many as 10 or 20. Each persona is approached differently from a marketing perspective, making it important to understand them individually. While personas can be time-consuming, they are highly effective. If you’re new to personas, you can start small. Remember, you can always develop more personas later if needed.
How to Create Customer Personas
Customer personas can be created through interviews and research of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contacts database
Interviews
It might be easiest to start by looking at your existing audience, which includes both current customers and prospects. You could send a series of surveys to these groups or hold one-on-one interviews. Develop in-depth questions, ranging from demographic information to why they chose your product or service.
Research
CRM and sales data information can be a great source of information for creating customer personas. Ideally, your form fields should be asking a broad range of questions to qualify your leads. This information should be able to show trends like company size or type, contact job titles and the types of content they consume most. Your sales team may be able to provide additional insights into common answers and interactions they have with customers. Evaluate your collected data for insights and commonalities. Generalize this information into an aggregated view for each customer type.
What Do You Do With Customer Personas?
A customer persona should be the guiding force in your marketing endeavors. Whether you are launching a new product or redesigning your website, you should be consulting your personas. You’ll gain insight into what your audience will identify with, what will capture their interest, and what features will enhance usability.
You don’t need to make guesses on how you think customers will think, react, or respond. You will be able to draw conclusions based on interviews and research. You’ll know where your information will reach them best and what type of content is most valuable to them. The bottom line is that a persona takes away the guesswork.
Continue Creating Your Customer Personas
Developing your customer personas is an ongoing process. While the initial development of a persona is a one-time event, personas are meant to be honed and refined over time. As long as your business strategy and offerings stay the same, your initial personas will stay fairly similar, but changes in the market and other outside forces can be expected to create minor tweaks. It’s important to keep your personas timely and relevant.
Safeguard knows that creating customer personas can be a tempting step to skip. Remember that these personas are more than a snapshot of your customers. These customer personas are a strategic tool in decision making that will help your business grow. Safeguard has all the business solutions you need to run and grow your business. Contact us today to get started with your personal Safeguard consultant.