Hey, it’s Dave and Ellie! Why customer personas are so valuable
Do you have a customer that truly embodies the ethos of your brand and is your ideal customer? Do they have a name? Are you able to recognise and recount their characteristics and traits? Would you know how to connect with them outside immediate interactions with your business?
This is the business of creating personas. A persona is a representation of your target audience. It's based on market research and real data about your ideal customer.
Ideally, the persona-creation process should be a part of the research phase for a product or feature, before the actual design process starts. That being said, if you don’t have a customer persona for your business, it is never too late to start. Also, if you are finding that your business is attracting a new type of customer, then it would be worth undertaking a persona mapping exercise.
But why do marketers get so worked up about customer personas?
Well, it’s simple really. If you understand the behaviours and attitudes of your ideal customer, it will help you build your marketing and communications strategy and enable you to create the most engaging marketing and communications programs for your customer that will have the most chance of success.
Identifying and keeping your personas front of mind when developing targeted programs makes for more efficient and effective marketing.
Personas help you adjust and focus your marketing and communications so that they are strategically positioned to target consumers who are likely to be interested in your business. Personas provide valuable insights that you can use to convey your message to the right audience at the right time.
Personas also give you the insights required to make decisions about how to craft your brand messages through your marketing and communications activities. This allows you to create compelling messaging and content that meets the needs of each persona.
They can also help you discover insights into your audience’s channel behaviour. Where are they having conversations? What topics are they interested in? Personas can help you pinpoint how best to contact your customers. Knowing where your ideal customer spends most of their time engaging, be that via traditional offline media such as television, or via social media platforms this will help you ascertain the best platforms to use to get in touch with your target audience.
It isn’t just your business that requires a persona. Some individual products, or even events, benefit from undertaking a customer persona exercise. This helps focus marketing and communication activities and saves costly blow outs in time and effort.
So, how do you go about creating your customer personas? A quick way to do this is through three simple steps.
1. Gather information about current or potential customers.
Demographics including age, gender, income, family status, education level, and location are a good starting point.
Psychographic data such as values and beliefs are very important.
Also include their biggest challenges, needs, and desires; these will help you understand your customers’ motivations.
Identifying where and how they spend their time consuming media is invaluable.
2. Determine the right number of personas for your business.
There is no magic number of how many personas you need will depend on your business, and both your current and ideal customers. We have seen businesses with two personas, some with four. It simply depends on your business and the products and services you offer. When you start with one persona you will quickly see how many personas your business requires.
Remember, you cannot have the one-size-fits all approach, nor the business that is trying to target everyone. That simply isn’t feasible. It is best to put a line in the sand if you are defining too many personas and cap it to four personas, simply for the ease of business. If your business has a number of product or service streams, you may find that each of those has one or two personas.
3. Humanise your personas.
That’s right, humanise your persona. There are many businesses that have life-sized cutouts, complete with nameplate, of their personas in their marketing, sales and customer service department floors so everyone can ‘see’ their ideal customer and ensure they are constantly front of mind.
Giving your personas a name and other defining details such hobbies and job titles, and even finding photos to represent them – is part of what makes a persona an effective tool. Include the demographic and psychographic data you collected in step one, and you have yourself a bonafide customer persona.
For example, meet Ellie.
Ellie is 23 years of age.
She lives in Newtown with her two housemates, a cat called Milko and a bird called Roger.
She works in health research at the University of Sydney and is very focused on her career and climbing the career ladder. She is looking to undertake her Doctorate within the next five years.
She takes great care with her appearance and likes to shop consciously and sustainably.
She has a large circle of friends that she made at school and university and has a very active social life.
She has been with her partner, Corey, for the last six months, meeting him through friends.
She is vegetarian and is conscious about eating sustainably sourced foods. She eats out at least twice a week.
She doesn’t own a car and either cycles or takes public transport.
She tries to go for a run twice a week before work when she can.
She spends a lot of her time connecting with friends and family on Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok.
As the house doesn’t have a television, she gets her news on social media networks and online sources. She watches streaming services such as Netflix and Binge on her iMac.
In summary, personas are a key foundational building block for any brand. They can help you figure out how to reach people on a more personal level, while delivering the right messages, offers, and products at the right time.
