What are you going to ask someone when they walk into your store? Most probably their preferences, like what would they like to have from your collection, right? And how will you approach a person to target them to become your customer? By researching about and assessing whether they like to use what you sell.
This is what makes up a key part of what customer persona is.
What is a Customer Persona in Detail?
In layman terms, customer persona or buyer persona is what someone refers to the general details of their target audience that includes their interests, gender, demographics, motivations, webographics, goals, social-economic status and all. All these factors define who your ideal customer is, who you should target, and who is more likely to become a qualified lead and then convert into a paying customer.
Customer persona can also be defined as marketing persona, or audience persona – terms or jargons that digital marketers use to create the intricacies to put the needs and wants of their ideal customer targets as the basis of their marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something that doesn’t stop at what you are doing within your website, but also how you create the outreach strategy to reach to your target audience. And this is where defining buyer persona is critical to the entire SEO strategy.
Why Customer Persona is an Important Aspect of Digital Marketing in Today’s Times?
More or less, a customer persona is a kind of profile that defines your optimal buyer. When you know who to target, who are more likely to convert into customers, and which customer segmentation (taking into demographics, interests, preferences, likes, and other factors) you should target, you redefine your digital marketing strategy likewise.
A customer persona is a character or fictional persona that you create to identify the capacity to tailor your marketing content and strategy and focus your advertising endeavors to the intended target group. The biggest advantage of defining customer persona in digital marketing is that marketers can create an approach that address their target customers’ issues, which means your marketing efforts present a business profile which is more capable to solve target audience’s issues and thus this effectively increases your lead conversion rate.
Buyers are more likely to go for brands and products, service that deliver them with personalized solutions.
And what does creating customer persona do to you? It helps you make your service or product offering with a personalization approach that feels more humane to the customers.
How Customer Persona is Different to Market Segmentation?
You may think that creating a customer persona is a new-trend-word of what the old-fashioned market segmentation is. In reality, it isn’t so. In fact, it is the more evolved, refined part of market segmentation is.
|
Customer Persona |
Market Segmentation |
|---|---|
|
It depends on psychology of the consumers |
It is more on the starting level, not delving deep into the psychological thinking of the customers |
|
It explores how buyers behave based on their gender, demographic, age, likes and lifestyle |
This only depends on social status, age and gender |
|
This comes when you have already recognized the personality traits of homogeneous groups |
This targets people as heterogeneous groups without digging deep into personalities |
What Benefits Digital Marketers Gain from by Creating Customer Personas?
A customer or buyer persona is something that tells their story. This way you are able to personalize your branding and outreach. There are several benefits that creating customer personas will help you make your marketing efforts worthwhile and standout:
Custom-Tailor Your Approach Right from Scratch
Right from creating your digital presence, to establishing your digital footprint, and adopting SEO strategy, when you have the clear idea about who you are going to target, where, when and how, you know you have the blueprint ready to formulate your digital marketing approach.
It means you are no longer limited to vague depictions or summing up loud announcements. Rather you know how to excite your target audience the way they will love.
Establish a Healthy Brand-Customer Relation
A satisfactory customer service is one of the biggest concerns for today’s smart consumers. When you are able to psychologically understand your target audience, create a service delivery structure that connects with them, it helps to create a healthy relationship, which means you are able to keep them as long-term customers.
Collect Quantitative Data
The process of creating customer persona helps you to gather quantitative insights that can be done effectively using site analytics (examples being Google analytics, Twitter analytics and many more). This works even better for ecommerce sites as they can create cross-channel integrations to target specific set of buyers. Collecting quantifiable data also helps to create content that is most likely to be liked and preferred by your target audience.
Establish Customer Centricity
Customer-centricity means you are able to create advertising campaigns understanding their psychology and their behavior. You are much more able to create every digital aspect that is centered on your customer’s needs, helps to create an interactive platform, and engage in outreach programs from email marketing to social channel feeds that see and address issues from the point of your target audience.
Create Action Plan for Certain Needs of Buyers
As customer persona is all about knowing their preference and interests, you will know what specific they need, from where and how. And this way you can work on an actionable marketing plan that will help you reach them much more effectively.
Work on Right Advertising and Marketing Format
With customer persona, you are able to create your marketing content in the bright format, with an effective brand appeal message, whether it is a blog, social media posts, videos, ads, and much more.
Create the Right Connect at the Right Time
With customer persona, you know where you target audience is, at what time, and how they are available on the platforms. This way you know how to connect with them, at the right place at the right time.
Stay Ahead of Your Competition
When it comes to digital marketing, everybody is out their slugging it out to gain leads and improve conversion. And many are doing that just abruptly, focusing more on what they are doing, rather than thinking the things from the customer point of view. This is where customer persona can make your digital marketing efforts will lead you to stand out from the competition.
What Your Customer Persona Should Look Like? What You Should Focus On?
While you know how critical creating customer persona for your digital marketing efforts is, there are some key elements that it should include:
Profile Background – This is the first and key element, which should include the target customer demographics, gender, age, their lifestyle, expenditure capability, interests, and so forth.
Challenges They Face – With every product or service, every customer is looking to meet
some kind of requirement or solution. This is what you have to understand and create your marketing plan that provides that solution to them, backed by the product or service you offer.
Buyer Objectives – With customer persona, you will have a segmentation of your target audience. Define what their long and short-term goals are.
Create Value Proposition – Your customer persona profile should be based on a value proposition, meaning clearly and concisely defining what is important for them, and how you can prove valuable to them.
What Platforms & Channels to Use for Creating Customer Persona?
Now, as you know what your customer persona should include, it is important to know ‘from where’, which are:
Analytics – As we have told above also, tools like Google Analytics help you gather a lot of actionable metrics into customer journey.
Social Media – There are a lot of social channels, where most people love to engage and spend their time on. What activities they are engaged in, who they are following, what they like, what interests they have, what they share, what they love to view and read will give you a detailed insight into their behavior.
Facebook Insights – We have listed it separately from the above point, because this is a specific tool built to give you insights into what content the users are spending their time on and respond to. This tool will help you dig deep into their demographics and cross-references.
Keyword Research – Have you heard about user intent when it comes to SEO? If you are actively engaged in search engine optimization and marketing, then you would be aware of this. With basic SEO based keyword research, you gain insight into user intent behind their search queries that will help you quantify what they are looking for.
Other Methods – You would definitely have been presented with survey forms or feedback forms from ecommerce sites, or other portals and businesses? Well, this is also one of the key elements of gathering insightful data into their experienced, their suggestions and such, so they can adopt a more personalized approach in your marketing efforts.
Is There a Thing Like Negative Customer Persona? Is it Helpful?
Well, this might sound like something that must not be there, but is an aspect of customer persona, which could be helpful for you. Yes, you read that right. Negative persona means creating an antithesis of the target audience, meaning sorting out who are not your ideal customers. This will help you segment who to target and who to not. Thereby, your marketing efforts will be much more concentrated and focused and will reap better rewards.
Conclusion:
So, now you have a customer persona created? Now what?
Target where they are, think and create marketing material from their viewpoint, create content that connects with them emotionally, and speak like they do. Creating and working customer persona isn’t a one-time thing, but a continuous journey of your digital marketing approach. Ensure to keep working on reviewing and refining your buyer persona.
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How Customer Persona is Becoming a Core Element of Businesses’ Digital Marketing Approach
Source: Trends Pinoy
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