Customer personas (also known as buyer personas or marketing personas) are fictional representations of your target customer. Marketers create them to help them better understand their target audience and create marketing campaigns that resonate with them.
Customer personas are based on research and data analysis of your target market. They can be created using various sources, such as surveys, customer feedback, social media analytics, and website analytics. Once you have gathered enough information, you can use it to create a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
Creating customer personas aims to help marketers better understand their target audience’s needs, wants, and behaviors. Doing so can create more effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers and increase conversions.
By creating customer personas, marketers can tailor their messaging and marketing campaigns to resonate better with their target audience. For example, suppose your customer persona is a busy working mom who values convenience and efficiency. In that case, you should focus your marketing messaging on how your product or service can save her time and make her life easier.
Customer personas can also help marketers decide where to allocate their marketing budget. For example, if your customer persona is a young, tech-savvy individual who spends a lot of time on social media, you may want to invest more in social media marketing to reach that audience. The best marketing personas utilize data from your market research and in-depth interviews/surveys with your customers.
How many marketing personas do you need? It depends on the type of business you’re running. But if you’re new to them, start with one or two to get the hang of it first. Unfortunately, there aren’t standard personas out there that your creative marketing services can grab and just tweak a bit for your company – but that’s because you want your buyer persona to be as specific as possible to your potential buyer. However, you can use templates to get started on a buyer persona.
Here are some ways to gather research that will inform your buyer personas:
- If you have a contacts database, analyze it to discover patterns in how people find your content and what platforms they consume it on most frequently.
- When creating forms for your website or providing access to whitepapers or ebooks, ask customers a little bit about themselves before they can download your content or sign up for your newsletter. For instance, the industry they’re in, how big their company is, or what title they hold at their organization.
- Ask your sales team or those in customer-facing positions at your company if they have noticed any patterns or similarities in the types of customers you serve.
- Interview customers and prospects to discover why they love your product/service.
Once you’re ready to start crafting your buyer personas, here are some details that are helpful to know about to make them as lifelike as possible:
- Basic demographics: age, gender, geographic location, income
- History: what kind of family they come from, job, career path, lifestyle
- Personality traits: introvert vs. extrovert, adventurous vs. likes consistency
- Communications preferences: Are they on Facebook? Twitter? IG? Where do they find content? How do they communicate with others?
- Goals: What are this person’s goals in life? What do they hope to achieve?
- Challenges: What does this person struggle with? What’s preventing them from reaching their goals?
- Your role: What can you do to make life easier for this person and to help them achieve their goals?
To recap: customer personas are an essential tool for marketers looking to create effective marketing campaigns. They help marketers better understand their target audience, tailor their messaging, and make informed decisions about where to allocate their marketing budget. By creating customer personas, marketers can increase their chances of success and achieve their marketing goals.
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