A persona is the ideal representation of the customer you want to sell your products or services. It may seem like a simple task, but you need to go deep into the configuration of this desired profile and also figure out how to do it.
Understanding the potential consumer with a persona can help us determine the type of content and products we need to expand our business. In other words, personas are an important tool in their marketing and sales strategies.
First of all, you can't confuse persona with target audience, which is much more comprehensive and generic.
The target audience is the social, economic and demographic definition of who will consume your product.
The persona, on the other hand, brings more details, creating greater connection and empathy with the client, which leads to more focused and efficient creation and segmentation.
The idea of the article is to guide you through an ideal and contextualized persona model, assuming you already know about your market.
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First of all, the basics!
A persona (or buyer persona in English) is the semi-fictitious representation of a real customer based on the market and independent trend surveys and, if you are lucky, analysis of existing customers.
If you still don't have research on your own customers, think seriously about starting, even to make it easier to form this profile in an organized way.
The preparation process to create your persona may include:
- Analyze existing consumer data
- Interview clients
- Perform online searches based on your specific location and company (say: Google search!)
- Many online resources provide guidance that can help you collect the right kind of information.
Here is an example of what you might want to include:
- Demographic data (age, sex, ethnicity, income, etc.)
- Behaviors (where they buy, what they read, etc.)
- Personal background (professional backgrounds, hobbies, tastes, etc.)
- Specific objectives
- Needs / desires
- Concerns or challenges
- Physical and social environment
- A photo
Keeping the details consistent and specific – and avoiding generic statements – will help your persona to come to life as a “real” person.
Step 1: Do a full public survey
Your buyer personas need to be based on real-world data, not instincts. Compile data about your existing customers and social audience
Consider details such as age, location, purchasing power, standards, interests, challenges, stage of life. Learn what social networks your audience uses.
You need to reach your customers using the right channels. Start by learning where they already spend time online. Some great tools help in this search like Google Analytics. See which social networks appear in your reference traffic report.
Keep an eye on the competition. Try to find out or speak benchmarking with some customer research tips, which your competitors have already done or do.
Step 2: Identify customers pains
What problems or annoyances are your potential customers trying to solve? What's to stop them from succeeding? What challenges do they face to achieve their goals?
An important way to find out is to engage in tool community forums and social media groups. It is always possible to understand what people who work in the same segment want to solve.
Configure search streams to monitor mentions to your brand, products and competitors provides a real-time insight into what people are saying about you online. You can find out why they love their products or which parts of the customer experience are simply not working.
Step 3: Function and position
What exactly does your ideal customer do for a living?
Do you tend to get involved with board members (CEOs, CFOs and other top executives)?
Who do they report to if there's anyone?
The answers to these questions depend on the goals of your business. For example, if your company meets a market predominantly B2B, you can assume that your audience is made up of business decision makers – individuals in charge of making purchase and acquisition decisions.
By answering this question and starting to profile your customers, you can include information like:
- Educational achievement
- Vocational training
- Skills
- Organisation position
These factors, in turn, will help you decide the tone of your messages and what kind of language to use.
Step 4: Responsibilities and daily activities
What's a typical day in your client's life?
What tasks are a normal day of work for them?
How do they measure the success of their work?
What skills do they need to accomplish their work?
These questions allow you to understand the motivations and challenges of your potential customers. Of course, some questions apply to some situations and others do not.
For example, these questions assume that your customers are employed. In this case, feel free to rephrase the questions according to your objectives.
Step 5. Media consumption habits
How much time does your ideal customer spend on social media?
Where do they get their news? What kind of content do they consume more daily – videos, articles or posts on social networks?
What's their favorite social network platform?
These questions help you find out what kind of content your ideal customers regularly consume and where they search for news and information online.
The answers to this may be the difference between your company creating mainly video content or blogs or posting on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Step 6: Demography and firmography
What is the average age of your customers?
Are they single, married and/or have children?
For organizations, what type of sector do they operate in? What are your sectors?
What challenges do companies face?
Demographic data may seem unimportant, but it can help you frame your messages for a specific age group. For example, the y generation (millenials) tends to worry more about the price and prefers to make a fuss about experiences such as vacations, shows and live sports events.
The firmographic data used in ABM (Accounted Based Marketing) strategies, on the other hand, they allow you to find out if the organization has an unmet need that your business can solve.
These data are especially useful for B2B companies and the search for personas from large companies.
Step 7: Values
What values and principles do your customers strongly believe?
What are the personality characteristics of your customers?
You can dive deeper into the qualities that define the personality, worldview and values of your potential customers. Also known as psychographics, these factors fill in details that allow identifying the attitudes, perspectives and ideals of their clients.
Psychographic data is particularly useful for creating marketing messages that appeal to the heart and soul of your audience – something that demographic data cannot capture.
These qualitative factors will help you to know what your audience is concerned about and how your brand can use this to connect with them on an emotional level.
Step 8: Targets and motivations
What are the professional objectives of your customers?
What are your personal goals?
Like anyone else, their potential customers are driven by personal goals and motivations. Dedicating time to understand these goals allows you to see how your company goals align with their goals.
The more things your goals have in common with their goals, the easier it will be to create marketing messages aligned with your audience. Not to mention that this really helps to solve the problems of your potential customers, ensuring satisfaction in your offer.
Conclusion
One of the biggest reasons for building customer personas is that it encourages teams or organizations to think about communicating the benefits of their product or service in terms of the real people who will use them.
This forces you to think of them as people, not just users or customers or some abstract concept. This also helps you think about how to provide real value to your customers, which is ultimately what matters to them.
Completeing your persona is just the beginning. There is still plenty of room for improvement, especially as you get to know your customers more.
In time, make sure to add or change factors such as skills, influences, favorite brands and even the technology your persona uses to make your descriptions more detailed.
To facilitate the design of your persona, we suggest some free tools that exist in the market:
The fantastic Persona Generator
After your created persona(s), you can already think of attracting interested customers in your business. This post here on Blogexplains why it is important to generate leads for sales.
Did you like the article? Did it help you in any way? Leave your comment below.
See you next time!
