What is a Customer Persona? Quick Guide!
Customer personas are important parts of any digital marketing campaign. A customer persona(a.k.a. a buyer persona) is generally described as the perfect target customer for any business. Entirely fictional, this persona (or several personas) represents a particular customer type and can be used to appeal to similar real-life potential customers. As they are common in business-to-consumer markets, they can also be applied in business-to-business markets.
Those businesses which use a blog or email marketing list for their customer engagement often choose to adopt a customer persona when producing these marketing hooks. This may be an employee or freelance writer producing articles as if from the point of view of this fictional character, emphasizing how the brand or product has been beneficial to them. The idea is to hook the reader or visitor, a potential customer, into signing up, buying the product or becoming involved with the business in whatever way.
Customer personas are based on the analysis of real customers. Personas are often built up from data provided by existing customers, early adopters, keyword searches related to the product and surveys. They have to be seen to be realistic, so they will often incorporate words, behaviour, attitudes, and arguments typical of the group. While collecting and organizing information about the customers might be relatively easier, it is harder for businesses to step into the shoes of the customer.
Maintaining the customer perspective and visualising what the person is thinking are keys. Therefore, the process of creating a customer persona can help to reach less tangible insights, such as whole experience throughout the customer journey. As well as opportunities for effective communication.
This is also where the copywriters come in, as they can assume the persona of that customer, and write from that point of view.
A customer personas usually have a profile. This will give a map of vital statistics, (age, status, typical occupation, potential location) as well as a map of likely interests, hobbies, motivations, and frustrations.
A customer persona allows a company to effectively target those people most likely to be interested in buying their product or signing up for their course. It’s no good a firm targeting a new demographic for their niche unless the marketers slant it to appeal to that demographic. In order to grow, the firm has to have a clear growth plan, and that may well involve trying to appeal to a different type of customer from time to time, in order to build their market coverage.
How Customer Personas Used?
Personas are used in all marketing disciplines. Just as an example, using personas is valuable in web design projects as well. It allows for creating more customer-centric web design experiences. Naturally, it is a usual part of the user interface and user experience design processes.
Personas are helpful in content marketing strategies since they can support a more sophisticated approach to content marketing by identifying the interests and behaviour of your target audience. This way it is possible to produce content directly addresses them.
Negative customer personas can also be used to profile the kind of customer a company does not want – so they invert all the positive traits and come up with their nightmare client. These people are likely to be high maintenance and when a company is looking to grow its customer base, attracting these types is usually considered too high a risk to take.
In the early days of developing a brand, a website, an offering or a product, knowing the target market is key. Businesses may have an idea of who they are hoping to attract, but working on projecting a customer persona will help the initial success of a digital marketing campaign because everything will be targeted at the right people from the start.
