Defining personas for your customers is crucial for any marketing strategy.
When you create a buyer persona, you begin to understand the motives that will lead your ideal customer to purchase your product.
By developing marketing strategies with a customer persona in mind, you’re able to get to know your ideal customer – even if you haven’t had the chance to meet them face to face in real life.
Here’s everything you need to know about defining your ideal customer persona and how to create content with them in mind.
What is a Customer Persona?
Persona definition: a fictionalized character of a person you want to utilize your company’s products or services.
When you create a customer persona, you’re considering all the facets that make up your ideal customer, including their behavior, preferences, problems, needs, motivations, and how they can benefit from the use of your product.
The more detail you can add to your customer persona, the better.
You and your marketing team should be able to get a clear visual of your ideal customer through your written persona, including where they live and how they move through their day-to-day lives.
In most cases, marketing teams find it helpful to assign real names to their customer personas, allowing teams to refer to customer personas in conversation.
You may also find it helpful to assign a cartoon-like face to your customer persona.
The more you can make your customer persona into a real person in the minds of your marketing team, the better.
Why are Customer Personas Important?
When you’re working to develop a marketing campaign, it can be tough to connect with the ambiguous idea of your target market.
You may be picturing a person who doesn’t exist or a group of people whose specific qualities are unlikely to exist in large quantities in the real world.
That’s not to say that you should stop trying to appeal to a niche market.
Instead, it’s important to fully understand the pressures, challenges, and joys that your target customers face in day-to-day life.
Creating customer personas can be a smart way to help you feel like you’re creating a marketing campaign designed for real people – not a figment of your imagination.
When you create a customer persona, you get to know the real lives of your target market.
You may also find that it’s easier to imagine how your company’s products or services could fit into their lives.
This can help you hit your target market’s pain point in a way that helps them see the value you offer.
Customer Persona vs. Marketing Persona: What’s the Difference?
The difference between the two is simple: customer or user personas are based on research on how to appeal to future customers, while marketing personas are based on existing customers.
Both types of personas are valuable parts of a marketing plan.
Marketing companies use customer personas to help develop campaigns, learning how to market their products or services in a way that solves problems for their target market.
Marketing personas, on the other hand, can be used both to develop new campaigns and understand where old campaigns have succeeded or fallen short.
10 Steps to Defining Personas
Now that you understand the importance of developing a customer persona, it’s time to dig in and get started.
- Step 1: Understand their pain points and challenges.
- Step 2: Flesh out their professional life.
- Step 3: Determine your customer persona’s values and principles.
- Step 4: Figure out what motivates your persona.
- Step 5: Think through the process of the questions your customer persona asks when deciding whether to make a purchase.
- Step 6: Decide where your customer persona gets their news and other forms of media.
- Step 7: Imagine what it’s like to spend a day in the life of your customer persona.
- Step 8: Consider your customer’s career path: how did they end up in their current line of work?
- Step 9: Imagine what type of education could have led your customer persona to the lifestyle they have today.
- Step 10: Nail down the personal demographics of the person you’ve created through the customer persona visualization process. Be sure to include their family structure, where they live, their gender, their age, their household income, and their relationship status.
It can take some time to create the perfect customer persona for your company.
It’s also normal to go back to the drawing board and tweak your customer persona details as you learn more about your target market.
The more you envision what your ideal customer looks like, the better you’ll be able to determine the best way to market to your target market.
Creating Personas: Your Key to Creating Relevant Content
When creating an accurate picture of the audience you’re trying to reach through your marketing campaign, you’re able to draw your audience into what you have to offer.
This can be a key component of an inbound marketing plan and can help your target audience feel like they mesh with what your brand has to offer.
Generate More Accurate Buyer Personas
If you’re ready to move forward and create buyer personas that drive your company’s growth, we’re here to help.
Check out these eight strategies to develop the ideal customer persona and drive your business forward.
