Based on past purchases, services performed or ongoing transactions, your client is likely to have a general understanding of who their customers are, but they don’t have the hyper-personalized data it takes to target a customer at an individual level. It can be difficult sometimes to persuade them otherwise. With that being said, explaining the value and importance of personas to your client may take some work. It’s a strange concept to wrap your head around at first but makes complete sense once grasped.
In a nutshell, below is a definition of a persona you can use to explain the term to your client:
A persona is a fictional representation of an ideal or existing customer that can be used for targeting and marketing message creation. Usually, a persona will have a name, age, gender and other relevant demographics and insights which can help to create a visual image of the target customer.
Overall personas help to identify opportunities in marketing personalization; they reduce waste and limit marketing budget spend by narrowing the audience down to a single demographic target. Of course, to be effective, businesses should have more than just one persona. For most businesses, a customer base will be comprised of various demographic types. The key is to identify the most valuable customers and develop profiles to deliver marketing that caters to their specific needs, lifestyles, and their purchasing patterns. Once you have a set of profiles, you can begin to see a much higher return on investment from your overall marketing spend.
Personas can also serve as an impetus for developing new business ventures that cater to the needs of an ideal demographic. The more detail that goes into fleshing out personas, the more business intelligence you have, allowing you to inform all of your strategic initiatives.
There’s not one go-to place to collect data for customer personas, in fact, customers often hit various touchpoints before completing a purchase and several occur even after the purchase. That’s why it’s important to take inventory of the various checkpoints in your sales funnel to understand where and how to acquire data relevant to defining personas.
User pathways and engagement throughout your site can provide insights into customer interests and thought processes. But also be sure to look at demographics such as ages, genders, locations, affinity categories of customers who have made a purchase or inquired on their site.
These all help to paint a picture of who the customers are behind the scenes. Of course, we should take this with a grain of salt as most of this information is fairly general and doesn’t drill down to the individual level. That’s why it’s important to capitalize on the human resources within your client’s organization.
All of these methods are important opportunities for gathering customer intelligence. They may each reveal individual nuances but the overlap between them will be vital to shaping your customer personas.
It's a rather large task for any client to create their own personas, so marketers should be prepared to assist with all of the above methods of acquiring insight. This participation will ensure proper data collection processes occur including drafting up questionnaires, making suggestions for areas where data could be obtained and being ready to use a persona to target individuals through appropriate advertising channels.
This is the easy part, once completed a persona gives you a window into the specific wants, needs, and behaviors of an intended customer. Use the profiles you’ve helped develop and use these in your audience targeting digitally through PPC, social media, and even through traditionally by targeting like-minded customer prospects in areas with similar affinity populations.