No matter what your role is in the business world, it’s imperative to understand your customer so that you can tailor your communications accurately and precisely. However, your business won’t have just one type of customer that fits one profile — you’ll have multiple different customer personas (otherwise known as profiles or avatars).
Customer Personas Matter
When it comes down to it, personas act as fictional characters that represent how different users interact and use your service, product, site, or brand.
Just like each of us has different needs and wants, creating personas allows you to tap into your customer base’s diverse needs and wants to identify trends and commonalities among specific subsets of people.
Marketing a product without understanding your target audience or what they want is a huge mistake that will inevitably lead to customer loss. Rather than making decisions based on what you think your customers want, personas allow you to focus on what they want.
These personas are designed to fit a generic yet specific mold that provides you with a solid understanding of a customer’s likes, interests, concerns, and demographics.
Understanding and knowing how to utilize personas are vital to any business strategy, and they can yield some pretty powerful results.
But what does a persona look like, and how do you create one?
First things first, you don’t come up with a persona at random.
Creating personas involves looking at your analytics and figuring out trends and patterns that sum up a specific section of individuals.
You can Download my Customer Persona Worksheet HERE
When creating your customer personas, you will consider things like:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Profession
- Interests
- Motivations
- Concerns and pain points
- Mindset
For example, the start of one persona could be as follows:
- Brandon
- Male, 36, lives in New Jersey, single
- Works in the law industry as a law clerk
- He doesn’t go out much, prefers staying home and gaming
- Rents a townhouse, owns a car
Once you have these primary attributes, you can add different interests and concerns relevant to your business. For example, map out a customer journey — what are the steps your consumer has to take to go from hearing about your business for the first time to becoming a repeat, valued customer?
Then, depending on the additional attributes you add to Brandon’s profile, it could describe the type of user that signs up to your mailing list but never converts.
Alternatively, maybe his customer persona describes a user that engages with all content and is a top purchaser.
Ultimately, the idea is that certain types of people (aka personas) are more likely to engage with your product in a certain way based on their unique profile.
Different customer personas will require other marketing strategies to convert/engage them.
For example, a persona of a stay-at-home mom may not need as persuasive a marketing campaign as the single male persona — or vice versa.
Once you have developed three to five personas, you can choose which ones to focus on and then build content that will interest the different personas. Then, when you understand what Persona X needs to convert, you can tailor content.
As a result, you’re creating user-centred content that will only help grow and improve your business.
So, as we become more and more entrenched in the digital arena, customer personas are a powerful tool that will help keep your customers at the heart of your business.
Resources
Email: catherine@catherinenikkel.com
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Catherine Nikkel is a content creator, ghostwriter and the founder of Mindful Media. She specializes in helping CEOs, entrepreneurs and influencers create copy that engages and converts. Her work has appeared in Forbes, Huffington Post, Yahoo!, Authority Magazine, The LA Tribune and more.
