You’ve likely heard about customer personas (or buyer personas) in marketing, but what are they—and should you be using them?
The best marketing campaigns provide unique solutions, valuable resources, great experiences, and even moments of delight. But you’ll never know how to deliver them unless you know your customers’ problems, what they value, what they want to experience, and what makes them happy. You’re welcome to guess… but the road to bankruptcy is littered with marketing teams that put their hunches above actionable information.
A customer persona is the answer, helping you understand who your customers are on a human level. It takes you beyond established knowledge and connects you with the soft spots in your customers’ hearts and minds.
If you had the time and energy, you could do a deep dive into each customer. By conducting interviews with these individuals, along with their friends and family members, you could gather mountains of insights that would help you deliver on a daily basis for every person.
But that’s not possible. You don’t have the bandwidth to research each of your customers around the world. Instead, you need to aggregate the similarities among them to understand them on a deeper, but not that deep, level. You can accomplish this with a customer persona.
A customer persona (also referred to as a marketing persona, audience persona, or user persona) is a fictional individual that represents crucial elements of your overall audience. And it’s the ideal meeting point between customer specificity and generality.
When developed correctly, a customer persona is sort of like a marketer’s imaginary best friend. It will reveal the behaviors, preferences, motivators, pain points, and demographic data of your target audience, helping you score better marketing results all around.
Be aware that you can’t create these types of personas for prospective, purely hypothetical customers because the process requires familiarity. You need to examine customers from your current target market to see how they’re interacting, and not interacting, with your brand.
What is a buyer persona’s development process? It all starts with quality data. Here are some of the proven ways to gather this data:
Internal analytics: Use your own analytics software to evaluate your audience’s interests and behavior. Most of these insights will come from web traffic, email engagement, social media engagement, and other key metrics.
Competitor analytics: You should also use software to track how your target audience is engaging with competitors. Pay attention to strengths that you can borrow for your own efforts, as well as opportunities to stand out from the rest of the industry.
Social media: Follow the conversations and trends taking place on your brand’s most relevant social platforms. Focusing on your target audience’s preferred platforms ensures that you’re getting the most important insights and saves you the burden of wrangling many platforms.
Government data: Some of the most critical customer data you’re looking for has already been gathered and recorded. Using federal sources such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, you can get demographic insights, industry trends, economic projections, and more.
Industry data: While most federal data is free to access, you’ll need to pay for a deeper dive into your industry. The price can be worth it, however, because Forrester, Gartner, and other organizations create high-quality reports that can take your personas to the next level.
Customer opinions: In the hustle and bustle of analysis, it’s easy to forget the simple power of listening. Use focus groups, interviews, and surveys to ask your customers direct questions and get direct answers in return. You can also glean powerful insights from the online reviews they leave for your company.
Once you’ve gathered all the relevant data, begin highlighting the emerging patterns. You’re searching for common ground here, trying to identify the two to five personas that best represent the diverse and vibrant individuals who comprise your overall audience.
Throughout this process, you’ll begin to shape distinct personas. Give each of them a name that reflects the unique elements such as motivations, pain points, preferences, and communication style.
Now, you’re ready to share these personas with your broader team. When everyone is on the same page and ready to connect with your personas, each level of brand interaction will be improved.
Once you’ve created a buyer persona it can serve as the foundation of your targeted campaigns. In this way, it’s not so different from the foundation at a construction site. The concrete has been poured based on careful designs tailored to the terrain where you’re building and the goals of the project.
Thanks to the strength and parameters set by the foundation, the future stages of the project will be more dialed in and successful. Rather than being limited in your options, you’re empowered because you’ll know what you’re working with and will have opportunities to maximize it. You’ll avoid the analysis paralysis and scattered results that often result from unguided ideation.
Campaigns that are guided by personas often produce stronger leads, connect with higher-value customers, and score more impressive conversion rates. And your “foundation” will be just as sturdy as a well-built construction site, with retention rates also being higher. In this way, personas help improve your short game and also set you up for sustainable success in the long game.
Let’s look closer at five ways that personas help your marketing efforts:
The creation process inevitably relies heavily on your team’s unique insights and abilities. But if you lean too heavily on your own perspectives and not those of your customers, you might end up with a product or service that’s tailored to you. Businesses only thrive when they’re tailored to target audiences.
A customer persona is an ideal way to get to the heart of your customers’ day-to-day lives. Thanks to vital insights into their motivations and pain points, you’ll be able to deliver solutions that stand out for all the right reasons.
What is a user persona, if not a guide? And those insights take center stage when you’re creating personalized marketing campaigns. Consider these statistics:
76% of customers say personalized communications are a key factor in choosing a brand
78% of customers say personalized communications lead them to repurchase more often
78% of customers say personalized communications make them more likely to promote a brand to family and friends
Brands that effectively use personalized communications enjoy 40% more revenue than average companies
You’ve likely experienced the power of personalization in your own life. When a brand sends you a message that’s related to your current situation, there’s a higher chance of you reading it and taking action. On the flip side, you can spot a generic marketing message from a mile away.
Creating the right messages is only half the battle. You also need to understand who to target and when to do it. Each persona reveals preferences that’ll help you determine these factors. You’ll be able to connect via the optimal channels and with the right cadence.
Think of the time and money you could save by only using the optimal channels for marketing outreach, rather than sending out messages via all your channels. It’s like having a finite amount of water coming into a sprinkler system and trying to decide where to allocate it. You could run all the sprinklers simultaneously, diminishing the effectiveness. Or you could use a highly personalized approach, sending water directly to certain sprinklers when the grass will best respond to it.
When consumers feel connections, they’re more likely to reach for their wallets. Thanks to the elevated level of personalization made possible through your personas, you’ll see more conversions throughout your campaigns.
Remember how personalization can increase revenue by 40%? You can enjoy a slice of that pie by leveraging what you know about your audience. For example, if you sell coats and gloves and have a key persona that includes 18-25-year-olds in the northeastern United States, you could run a timely campaign promoting your most stylish parkas the week before a storm is expected to bring record-low temperatures to the region.
The same connections that drive real-time conversions can extend into the future to bring better retention. This sustainability is what truly sets personalization apart from other tactics that can potentially drive a spike in marketing results. By continually drawing insights from your personas, you’ll build upon early successes and set your business up for an even brighter future.
Developing accurate customer personas will require specialized skills from your entire team. And when it comes to putting those personas to use, the experts from Twilio SendGrid can help you identify the optimal channels to send your personalized messages.
Start today with a free trial (no credit card or commitment required). Not only will our user-friendly platform help you send efficient and accurate messages, but it also provides advanced tracking and metrics to help you continue learning about your audience and refining your personas.
