Building your customer persona

Marketing is all about engaging with an audience and building awareness for a product, service or even company. However, before you can create a winning marketing strategy and campaign, it is important to recognise who you want to target.

Now, we are not talking about interest or behavioural traits, more so, we are looking to create an overall image or identity for our ideal customer. The reality for many businesses is that they don’t know or more likely, haven’t spent time finding out, what their ideal customer actually looks like.

The focus of this week's blog is to help you understand the concept of the customer persona and how you can build customer personas to supercharge any marketing campaign.

What is a customer persona?
A customer persona is a detailed breakdown of who your ideal customer actually is. Think about it this way, if you don’t know who you should be targeting, how can you expect your marketing efforts to produce the best possible results?

A customer persona can be as detailed as you want it to be - we always suggest trying to be as detailed as possible. This will include a whole host of unique identifiers such as age range, gender, location, education, interests, goals, fears, income level, spending habits, hobbies etc.

By building up a layered profile of your ideal customer, you can uncover a range of questions and solutions that your marketing should be addressing to engage your intended audience.

Why is it important?
Customer personas are really important as they help you focus on creating content that will resonate with your intended audience. For example, lets say your customer persona indicates that your ideal customer is a male, aged between 18-24 who spends a lot of time on social media and enjoys consuming digital content. It would be counterproductive running a print marketing campaign in a local newspaper as the chances of reaching your intended audience would be close to zero.

Therefore, creating customer personas can help any business really focus their marketing activities that will have the best possible change of capturing the attention of the intended audience.

How can you create a customer persona?
When it comes to creating a customer persona, typically most businesses have two choices.

Firstly, if they already have existing customers, they can conduct short surveys to find out more about their customers and why they decided to become clients. The business can also analyse their customer accounts with the aim of uncovering commonalities between different clients such as location, age range, product or services purchased etc. This can be a great starting point for building out a more detailed customer persona that can be used in future marketing activities. The second option is to create a series of assumptions around what you believe your ideal customer should be and then test these assumptions based on feedback from your marketing activities and real client data as you convert prospects.

For example, you could start with giving your persona a name, age and location. You can then drill down into what level of education they should have as well as the job they currently do, including their average salary. From here, you can get as detailed as you want such as what hobbies they pursue, what their long term goals are and what challenges they face on a day to day basis.

Once you start to break down every aspect of your customer persona's life, you can start to uncover key details that will help you shape your marketing messages and ensure your campaigns are highly relevant to your audience.

Is one customer persona enough?
The short answer is no. You should be looking to create a number of customer personas that help you segment your ideal customers into different levels. This is particularly useful if you sell a number of products or services that would interest different groups of customers.

The more customer personas you create, the more options you have when it comes to your marketing as you can tailor the language, imagery and delivery method based on the needs of your ideal customers.

How can you test your assumptions?
Customer personas are most effective when they are tested against real world customer data. While you can make educated guesses or assumptions based on the traits you believe your ideal customer should exhibit, you need to validate these assumptions.

Every marketing campaign should be reviewed to see if the engagement levels were from the audience you specified. There are a number of tools to help you do this, from Google Analytics for your website traffic right the way through to campaign reports if you are running social media ads.

Customer personas are a living, changing entity, just like your customers. Therefore, it’s important that customer personas are regularly checked, refreshed and optimised to make sure your assumptions tally up with the realities of your ideal customer.

Summary
As we have seen throughout this blog, building a customer persona is not difficult, yet it is a common area that is omitted by most businesses. Investing time in understanding who the ideal customer is can go a long way to ensuring that every marketing campaign has the best possible chance of succeeding.

To find out how you can help local businesses improve their online marketing with your own Digital Agency, contact a member of our team today.

Until next time, take care.