If you want to be successful in marketing or create a brand worth remembering, then it is important to know your target audience. Customer personas help you visualize who your target audience should be and enable you to create messaging that your customers are more receptive to acting upon.
Creating personas is a great starting point for creating landing pages, lead generation forms, social media advertisements, and much more — ultimately driving ROI. Before diving into how you can get started creating your very own personas, we are going to first define customer personas and customer segmentation.
What are Customer Personas & Customer Segmentation?
A customer persona is defined as a specific individual or group of people who are likely to buy something from a company based on their characteristics, behaviors, and interests. The job of building customer personas and placing them into groups is called customer segmentation.
Both customer personas and customer segmentation have become more important in the past few years because of the rise in digital usage and technology. Let’s now look at some pointers about how you can create customer personas and use them for an overall effective marketing strategy.
4 Steps to Create Segmented Customer Personas for Your Business
Did you know that 90% of companies using personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of their buyers? (This means that if you haven’t set up your customer personas yet, you are missing out on potential revenue.) Here are 3-steps to follow to craft hyper-focused personas for your business.
1. Understand Your Customer
The first step to creating your personas is to know your customer. The best way to understand your customer is to interview them. Set up interviews with 10-15 of your most loyal and active customers to hear why they chose your product/services over the competition. Learn about who they are, how they found your company, and how they like to receive digital content from companies. Be sure to take good notes and record the conversation so that you can listen to the interview again if needed.
From your customer interviews, you probably heard things that you already knew and some things that you didn’t know. We are hoping that you heard a little bit of both to give you a better perspective of who your ideal buyer is.
2. Create Detailed Descriptions
Next, you need to create detailed descriptions of your key customers. Be sure to include their:
- Demographics
- Habits and Values
- Personality Traits
- Communication Preferences
- Location
- Social Capital
By gathering these insights, your team will be able to dive deeper into some of the pain points that your customers may have. Some of these pain points may be related to time, money, expertise, or something that hadn’t even crossed your mind. Your job is to figure out what that pain point is and find patterns.
After finding out what their pain point is, you can connect the dots on how your business is the solution. It’s essential that you figure out why your offerings ultimately make their job or life better.
3. Segment into Hyper-Focused Audiences
Next, you will segment your customers into one of 3-5 types based on their motivations and the information they provided. You will now have different audiences that you can create personalized content for those groups in the future. Pretty neat right?
4. Apply the Results
Now that you have crafted your buyer personas, it’s time to put your results into action. Let’s look into a few ways that you can effectively use customer personas in your next marketing initiative.
3 Ways You Can Use Your Personas to Meet Your Business Goals
If you take the time and energy to create buyer personas, but never use them, then your time has been wasted. You want to make sure that your hard work will reap the results you expect, and the only way to do that is to put your personas to action. Here are 3 common ways businesses use personas to increase ROI.
1. Content Creation
With the right customer personas, you can deliver highly targeted, effective digital content. By creating content that speaks directly to your personas, you will see increases in conversions and most importantly, sales. Utilizing your personas can help you tailor your messages to create a greater sense of relevance in what you say.
Here are some content marketing ideas you can use:
- Blogs
- Landing pages
- Social Media Posts
- Paid Ads
- Digital Guides or Resources
- Other Marketing Collateral
Fun Fact: Persona-based content increased customer engagement almost six-fold than they did when targeting cold leads.
2. Selecting the Right Digital Channels
If you’re trying to grow your sales, you’ve got to be aware of the best channels for your business. Each channel has inherent advantages and drawbacks, so you should always consider them both before picking a particular one. By referring back to your customer interviews, you will discover which digital channel you should be leveraging more.
Here are some of the best channels to grow your sales:
- Social Media
- Search Engines
- Your Own Website
3. Make New Product/Service Offerings
Lastly, you can use your buyer persona information to come up with new products or services for your business. Understanding and harnessing your customer’s emotions (hate, love, respect) is one of the most important ways that you can learn their preferences and provide them with better offerings in the future. (You may even start to sell a new product or service that you wouldn’t have even thought about before!)
It’s Time to Start Creating Your Customer Personas
Don’t let your business run off the rails anymore. Let customer personas help you define a business model, messaging, content strategy, and much more.
At Elevation Marketing, we have helped many B2B industries meet and exceed their digital marketing goals and increase their ROI. One of our specialties is in buyer persona creation. We specialize in helping you translate your current customer base into highly segmented customer personas to make your job easier.
If you are ready to start creating your B2B buyer personas, save time with our buyer persona template! You can download the guide here.
Author
Ryan Gould
Vice President of Strategy and Marketing Services
From legacy Fortune 100 institutions to inventive start-ups, Ryan brings extensive experience with a wide range of B2B clients. He skillfully architects and manages the delivery of integrated marketing programs, and believes strongly in strategy, not just tactics, that effectively aligns sales and marketing teams within organizations.
Ryan is known for taking complex marketing and business challenges and developing solutions that simplify processes while driving customer outcomes and business value. He also thrives on guiding Elevation teams toward execution of strategies that help companies succeed in new verticals, while staying true to core values and brand integrity.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rygould/