What Are Customer Personas?
Customer personas, also referred to as buyer personas, are made-up identities embodying qualities and characteristics that companies consider to be representative of their ideal customers, created as a means of focusing marketing campaigns on those most likely to purchase their brands. A buyer persona can help a compny better understand both its current and potential customers, allowing for a more targeted approach in the development and distribution of its products. As Adele Revella observed in her book, Buyer Personas, “In the simplest terms, buyer personas are examples of archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them.” (https://dig-digital.com). Customer personas can be more effective than other techniques of target marketing, going beyond basic demographics to identify cogent details of prospective consumers, by including such factors as likes and dislikes, interests, lifestyles, motivations and all manner of extended personal projections.
By creating customer personas, companies are better equipped to segment consumers for specific marketing approaches, with the ultimate goal of finding the best customers for their products, without expending excess energy trying to reach people who have little interest in their offerings. Any single company cannot possibly provide products that are suited to everyone; the practice of creating customer personas enables companies to concentrate their promotional efforts on potential buyers who are the best fit for their brands. Some questions companies might ask when creating customer personas are: Where do they live and work? What are their incomes? What are their aspirations, and their greatest challenges? What are their preferred buying habits? By detailed and intensive understanding of their invented personas, companies can more clearly predict how people will react when encountering their products.
How to Develop Customer Personas
Customer personas are developed by first utilizing various methods of consumer data-gathering, through surveys and interviews, as well as other types of buyer-based research. Once this information is collected and compiled, a persona can be created. Perhaps the most effective approach is to start by painting a picture of the idealized customer with broad strokes, starting with name, age, and geographical location. From there, the picture can be gradually fleshed out with details, determining whether this person owns a home or rents, lives in an apartment complex or a single-family home, going so far as to include specifics such as rent or mortgage payment amounts. This will lead to coming up with information about career and income, and even how the person feels about working, and if there is a sense of job security.
Next, it can be quite useful to explore the person’s interests, hobbies, and leisure-time activities, which can greatly influence a consumer’s buying habits and predilections. Important distinctions can be made at this point, including whether this person buys on impulse or takes the time to do research before making a purchase. This type of data can be utilized in the development of highly focused advertising strategies. As marketing influencer Neil Patel explains, “Think of creating customer personas as an upside-down pyramid. You start off with the broadest possible information for one demographic segment. As you shave away possibilities, you fill in details… Once you’ve understood that, you can enter their psyche to see what motivates them to spend.” (https://neilpatel.com). And, at every stage of creating a customer persona, it remains crucial to keep relating the persona back to the brand being promoted.
How to Effectively Utilize a Customer Persona
An example of effectively employing the concept of customer personas can be found in Twilio, a cloud communications platform based in San Francisco, which “allows software developers to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using its web service APIs.” (twilio.com). When Twilio decided to enter the project management space with their services, they hired a third party consultant, Campaign Stars, to develop a buyer persona, based on their new business offerings. Campaign Stars came to the conclusion that most of the buying decisions in this industry were done by managers and not developers themselves. Once this was figured out, they took Twilio’s white paper and turned it into an interactive application that they described as “appealing, educational and digestible.” With a new-found understanding of their audience, they successfully created buyer personas and organized Twilio’s content to target their new customer base. (https://tomislavhorvat.com/buyer-persona-case-studies).
Once a customer persona is created, companies need to turn the insights gained from them into action. Decisions can be made about where to place ads, making sure to communicate in language consistent with the personas and including content that is persona-specific. It can also be useful for a company to associate itself with other companies or influencers that are of particular interest to its personas. As podcast host Douglas Burdett has observed, “With properly researched buyer personas, you can eliminate guesswork about if your content is going to be on time and on target. If your content is not properly aligned with your buyer persona, it’s going to miss the target and fail to generate leads.” He goes on to say, “There is no silver bullet for creating content that attracts the right kind of traffic to your site and generates leads. But buyer personas come pretty darned close.” (https://www.salesartillery.com)