What are Customer Personas in Marketing?
Meeting Your Ideal Customers
Customers are the core of any business. Whether you are selling a service or a product, customers matter. In marketing, one of the primary goals of your marketing strategy is to identify your customers. After meeting your customers, you need to find ways to connect to and appeal to those customers.
Easier said than done, right?
In walks the customer persona. Looking up the term “customer persona” and “buyer persona”, I found the main idea is that a customer persona represents an existing or ideal customer for your company. Your marketing strategy should be centered around the needs of this customer.
WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF BUYER PERSONAS?
Companies use one or more buyer personas to better understand how to market and sell. Understanding your buyer personas is also a great way to determine how to find new leads. Also, customer personas can create a better customer experience.
SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS A PERSONA?
A persona can look like a lot of different things. Usually, it’s a document or even a PowerPoint slide or Canva graphic with a representative image of your customer. The image can be a drawing, cartoon, or real image of a person who represents your persona. There are even AI face generator sites.
Try https://generated.photos/face-generator/ or https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/.
Next, you need to give the customer persona a name. Sometimes, it’s fun to connect it to something about the persona’s job or character. For example, Marsha Marketer or Fred Finance. Then, give them a job title. Describe where they live and any other demographic information. This includes age, location, education level, etc.
Determine their biggest challenges or pain points.
What keeps them up at night?
Then, add some of their goals and interests. What would make their life easier?
Finally, add where they find out their information. This could be friends, news sources, or social media. Include some marketing messages or solutions that could help them with their challenges.
WHO AT YOUR COMPANY WILL BUYER PERSONAS BENEFIT?
Marketing teams are often in charge of developing buyer personas. Yet, any customer-facing team benefits from using buyer personas.
Business development can use personas to figure out pitches and other sales information.
Customer service can also use personas to better understand how to talk to customers. As well as how to offer solutions that meet customer needs and interests.
Leadership teams and executives can also use buyer personas. This exercise can show how goals align with product or service initiatives.
WHO SHOULD BE INVOLVED IN CREATING YOUR BUYER PERSONAS?
This is a great question! The more people and insight you can get into your buyer personas, the better. Everyone who benefits from a buyer persona should contribute.
You could also consider asking some of your own customers questions about themselves.
Buyer personas can even be based on one of your favorite customers. Or at least based on the information they have provided for you.
HOW DO YOU CREATE A CUSTOMER PERSONA?
It is easy to develop a marketing persona by utilizing a template. There are tons of resources available online. My favorites are by using simple tools that are free and can be easily shared.
Here are two helpful free buyer persona templates to get started.
Google Sheets - Buyer-Persona-Template
Canva - Buyer Persona Sample
Also, you can write a story about your buyer persona. Discuss a typical day in their lives. This may help to identify new attributes about your persona. You'll get insight into how they make their decisions.
You could record the story as an audio file to hear your customer speaking to you. You could also make a video about your customer persona.
HOW TO BUILD BUYER PERSONAS FOR BETTER MARKETING?
Buyer personas build better marketing campaigns and processes. The better you connect with your persona, the better you connect to customers.
Think about your buyer persona in your writing style, storytelling, and examples. They should connect with your customers, so they will want to build a relationship with you.
Buyer personas are useful for building better marketing campaigns. At every step of your marketing process, stop and check in with your buyer persona.
Change your perspective to review the campaign as your customer. Is there anything you should cut? Is there any way to make your message better?
USE BUYER PERSONAS TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Utilizing buyer personas can help you build a better customer experience. It’s important to think about campaigns and marketing techniques for lead generation. It's also key to think about how your customers can have an optimal experience.
Customers are sure to remember an exceptional experience with a brand. If you go above and beyond in some way to connect with your ideal customer’s personality, it will be impactful.
Customers will also remember a poor experience with your business. This may lead them to write negative reviews about their experience. Or share their poor experience with friends and acquaintances.
Buyer personas are a great way to learn about your customer. Or to establish the types of customers you'd like to have.