Customers are the driving force behind your business. After all, your business wouldn't exist without them. But do you know who your customer personas are and why they are important?
Customer personas are fictional people that represent your model customer. They share the most common characteristics of your customers. However, they are not just a list of demographic information such as age, location and income. Your customer persona will also have passions, strengths and flaws too. Understanding your customer persona can help you focus your time on those prospects that fit your business, guide product development, and align all work across your organisation, from marketing and sales to service and aftercare.
Why are customer personas important to a business?
Customer personas can help businesses better understand their existing and prospective customers. Understanding your customer personas will make it easier for you to tailor your messaging, content, services, and product development to meet your target market's needs, behaviours, and concerns. So you can fully understand what makes your best customers tick and what influences their buying behaviour, you need to develop detailed customer personas. The strongest and most useful customer personas are created from market research and insights you gather from your existing customer base through surveys and feedback.
Different types of customer personas
Depending on the size and type of business, you may have just a couple of customer personas or have as many as 20. But if you are new to creating customer personas, it's best to start small. However, it's important to keep in mind that while there are plenty of examples of customer personas you can use as a guide, there isn't a definitive list of customer personas that you can just choose from and adapt. This is because every business is unique, regardless of the number of competitors they may have, and because of this, their customer personas will be unique.
Researching customer personas
You can create customer personas through a combination of research, interviews and surveys, using existing and prospective customers and those who are generally outside your contacts but might align with your target market. When it comes to creating your customer personas, here are some tips to help you get started:
- Study your existing customer database to identify trends about how customers find and use your content
- When creating forms for your website, use form fields that capture useful persona information
- Review feedback from your sales teams on which leads they are interacting with the most
- Are there any generalisations you can make about the different types of customers you serve best?
- Interview existing and prospective customers to discover what they like about your brand, product or service
How to create customer personas
Once you have conducted your research, you can now use the raw data about your current and potential customers to create your customer personas. But to do this, you first need to identify any patterns and common features from the answers to the interview questions. You can also combine this research with sentiment analysis for product reviews to understand the language used in customer feedback to give you an insight into how customers rate your products.
1. Fill in your customer persona's basic demographic data
Compile demographic-based questions to ask in person, over the phone or via online surveys. You may also want to consider including descriptive mannerisms and buzzwords of your persona that you may have noticed during your conversations to help you identify certain personas when talking to existing or prospective customers.
2. Share with your team what you've learned
During this stage, you can share the information you have gathered from asking ‘why-based’ questions during the interviews. You can then tie this all together by telling people how your business can help them.
3. Support your sales team with preparing for conversations with your customer persona
At this stage, you should include real quotes from the interviews that demonstrate who your personas are, what worries them and what they want. You can then create a list of the objections they could raise so your sales team is ready to address them during their conversations with them.
4. Create messages for your customer persona
Tell your team how they should talk about your brand, products and services with your customer persona. Create tailored messages, including the type of vocabulary they should use, so it resonates with your customer persona. This will help ensure that everyone in your business speaks the same language when talking with customers and prospective leads. It is also a good idea to give each customer persona a name so that everyone in your team refers to each persona in the same way and ensures consistency.
Once you have created your first customer persona, don't stop there. Make as many customer personas as possible, so you have different ways to appeal to specific types of customers.
