Customer Personas: how well do you know your customer?
Understanding your customer is essential if you want to make successful business decisions, especially when it comes to PPC campaigns and content marketing. In this blog post I explain what a customer persona is, along with the benefits to your business and the process of creating one.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a fictional person that represents your target market. The process of creating a customer persona provides an understanding into what motivates them to buy, what are their purchase patterns, pain points, demographics, and goals.
Of course, businesses might not have just one type of customer. Going through this process you might identify that you have two or three different buyer personas. A career coach, for example, might work with a variety of people from executives wanting to get their next promotion, to women returning to work or perhaps people wanting to make a career change. Each of these people will require different marketing strategies, so segmenting your customers like this allows for better target marketing.
Why is it important to know your customer?
More effective marketing - Many people think they know who their customer is, and to be fair, they probably do on a certain level. But really understanding how your customers think and act means that you can target your customer more effectively by writing content, creating ads etc that will really resonate with them.
Increased conversion rates - The better you understand your customer the more accurate your marketing will be, thereby attracting higher quality leads and increased conversion rates.
Better ROI - And of course, in terms of PPC advertising this means you don’t waste money targeting the wrong people and will ultimately get a better ROI. Who doesn’t want to reduce ad spend through better targeting?
How to create your customer personas
There are many ways to create customer personas. Some of the larger organisations will interview customers or send out surveys to current and previous customers. Sites like Hubspot offer free customer persona templates that you can download and will take you through the process.
Don’t forget to look at the data you already have available to you in the form of website analytics and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter analytics. You could look at your current customer base and investigate if there are any common characteristics.
The next stage is to start building a picture of who they are. The following list will form the core of your customer persona:
- Who are they?
- Identify their goals
- What are the main barriers to achieving their goals?
- How can you help?
- What are their purchase patterns?
- How do they consume content?
- Demographics such as age, sex, income, profession, location
- Interests
- Influences
Many businesses will name their customer personas to help bring the persona to life.
Setting aside time to formally identify and create your customer personas will benefit your business in the long term. It’s so much easier to create content, plan PPC campaigns, write website copy etc when you truly understand your customer and who you are creating content for.
It will also help you focus and stay on track when planning campaigns and creating your marketing strategy.
Here at Pledge Consultancy I take the time to gain a comprehensive understanding of your business, challenges, aims and of course your audiences. If you would like help in this process, please get in contact with me either via email or phone 01392 927520.
