A Simple guide to effective customer personas

The days of simple segmentation of audiences and customers seem irreplaceably over. This means brands and organizations have to dig deeper. Why? To understand how they can meet their customers. How? By creating customer personas. But, how does that help?

The brand needs to be at the forefront, in the minds and hearts of their customers and audience.

Enter: CUSTOMER PERSONAS

How did the idea for customer personas come to exist?

Alan Cooper is credited with the creation of personas when he designed user experience (UX) personas in 1983. Cooper did this with informal interviews. He also used limited data points to understand the mindset of people. The goal was to empathize with their expectations and needs.

Fast forward to today. We have more data at our fingertips than we know what to do with. Data is collected data from social media, web traffic, business reports, app actions, event tracking, third-party applications. Even a simple business listing on Google My Business gives us immense information. We also use an infinite number of tools to process all that data. It leads to valuable information turned into actionable insights.

Thus, creating simple segments, won’t cut it anymore.

Enter customer personas or buyer personas or consumer personas or audience personas. You can create and call them what is most applicable to YOUR business and brand, but the definition remains the same.

Here’s how I define customer personas:

Customer Personas are characters, supported by data and research, representing your ideal customers.

Why do you need to create personas?

Creating targeted marketing tactics as part of of your overall strategy for relevant audiences can greatly reduce the resources and effort it takes to get effective results
By creating personas you get a deeper understanding of your customers. You can also assist them effectively, connect with them and nurture long lasting relationships.
Being customer-centric begins with understanding your customer’s journey. Additionally, you have to cater to their needs and wants. And, it’s personas that help you add value to your customer experience!

What are the benefits of creating personas?

Doing the necessary research, determining the identifiers, and creating personas isn’t an extremely simple task. But, it does get easier as you continue to create them. Having at least 5-10 personas is a must even for a micro, small or medium-size business (MSMEs). These personas are what you feed into your marketing framework such as STDC. But it all becomes worth it when you consider the benefits:

You can cater your content to each persona. In addition to improving awareness and engagement with your content. Inturn, accelerating your organic content marketing efforts
Your conversions reap the benefits of focus-designed customer journeys. Memorable and positive customer experiences are a goldmine for marketers.
The overarching performance measurement of ROI – return on investment is easily maximized with optimized use of resources. You gain more effective results by using personas.

Need stats?

Just in case you’re a stats buff and need more benefits. Here are some great stats on using customer personas from RockContent

Using personas increases email open rates by 2-5%. It increases e-mail CTR by 14% . Also, increasing email conversions by 10%
It increase web traffic by 210%. It can make websites 2-5 times easier to navigate. Further, it boosts organic search traffic by 55%
90% of companies that use personas claim to understand customers well. 82% were able to create better value propositions as a result

It’s clear that we don’t need any more reasons to make the case for creating customer personas. Now, we have established the WHY. It’s time to look at WHAT you can include while creating personas…

What to include while creating personas?

To create great customer personas, you can use a mix of information. You can use several data sources, customer surveys, qualitative insights, and industry knowledge. When creating personas you want to, at the very least, include:

Demographics and Basic Info: Age, Gender, Location, Ethnicity, Language, Income
Needs & Wants: addressing the pain points they face in your industry
Preferences: in the outcome of buying your product/service
Challenges: they face when looking for solutions that you provide
Lifestyle: to understand if they have intangible expectations as a result of their own
Values & Culture: that you have to respect and cater to in pursuit of their loyalty
Online Behaviour: Traits or channels that you can influence or affect to get noticed
Purchasing/Decision making: so that you can optimize your journey to their preferences
Goals & Motivations: that you can align your brand or offering positioning with

Is that enough?

That should cover enough information to create a great customer persona. Depending on the information available, I also like to include a mix of a few more elements such as:

A Day in the life: Map out an imaginary day in the life of the customer. Make it “real”
Brand Affiliations: that shapes their attraction to “brand equity” in their life
Social Media Activity: What do they like, what do they post? Who do they follow?
Research: How do they find out about you? What actions do they prefer, when they do?
Dreams & Aspirations: Cause no “human” is complete without them
Other Personal Traits: Include family, stage of life, career goals

The goal isn’t to have your persona be “perfect”. But you have to cater to your most ideal customer(s). It’s okay if a few elements don’t align. With enough detail and depth, you will have many relevant characteristics that apply. With these, you create focused marketing plans to benefit that segment of your audience/customer base.

My first persona: An example.

So without further ado, let’s jump into an example for the first full persona I have created and used before. The persona was created to understand how to increase customer acquisition for a smoke-free tobacco product:

Sample customer persona

It’s up to you to find a template and format that works for you. But the most important part is what information you fill it with! You can view great templates at any of the following resources:

Where to use customer personas?

The applications for personas are endless in marketing. But here are just a few ways you can utilize them:

When creating goals, you can definitely be more specific by creating separate goals for each customer persona. You can use SMARTER goal setting framework as a reference. Check out this EM blog post to know more.
As a starting point for funnel development. Since each persona may have different consumer journeys, you can chart this better. Here’s a great post on the evolution of the marketing funnel.
For impactful content development. You’ll also find that your content strategy benefits greatly with persona creation. You can be more relevant, more valuable and consequently deliver a larger impact on your audience.
While mapping customer journeys, creating unique journeys for each persona can help cater the experience you deliver and increase conversions and satisfaction.

Conclusion

Personas are the gradual step marketing has taken in pursuit of serving customers. It also provides a better understanding of who they are and what they need. Additionally, you can deliver added value by meeting the customers where they choose and making the customer journey smoother and effortless. This enhanced customer experience means catering to your audience with a customer-centric approach. It is what marketing has evolved into. Despite all the data we can collect, it seems almost lazy to not create personas that represent our ideal customers. And then plan our marketing strategy around it.

A Simple Guide to creating effective Customer Personas