The whole purpose of marketing is you’re trying to show your potential customers that your products or services are worth their purchasing through valuable content.
But how do you know what they might see as valuable content if you don’t know who your audience is or what they enjoy?
Introducing… customer personas!
Customer personas are fundamental to create before you begin any type of digital marketing activities. Read on to find out what they are, why they’re important and how to create them.
What are customer personas?
A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. This may include their geographical location, age, interests, goals, challenges and potential objections to buying your product and service.
The key thing to remember when creating a customer persona is that it’s a representation of who you want to buy your products or interact with your business.
While you may think you are trying to sell to anyone who would want to buy your products, there will be people out there who you don’t actually want to sell to. Whether that be because they won’t get the full benefits of your products, or because they mightn’t be as impressed and could give a bad review.
Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20!
Why are customer personas so important?
Imagine trying to market your products to every single person in the whole world – from every country, every language and every demographic.
Seems impossible, doesn’t it?
This is why customer personas are so important.
By gaining a clear picture of who your ideal customer is, what type of person they are and what they value most in life – it soon becomes simple to think of content that will appeal to them.
You’re trying to solve their problems and help them to reach their goals with your products, so by knowing what these are, it all becomes a lot simpler than before.
As a whole, your customer personas give you direction with your marketing, rather than just taking a stab in the dark with your content.
How to create a customer persona
Creating a customer persona should be a team effort and should always be backed up by research and evidence.
Whether that’s taking a look at the surface information of customers you already have and working from there, or sending out a questionnaire to these customers to fill out to get real, accurate answers. Either way, research is an essential part of getting these customer personas right!
Start with basic information such as their name and age, then you can get more specific as you go. Further information would include their job, income, location and living situation. You then need to find out how their interests, hobbies, lifestyle, goals and personal life impact their buying behaviour.
Ultimately you want to answer the question of why would they buy your products or services. Which of their problems is it solving? How are you going to convince them to purchase once learning their potential objections?
Once you have all of that information, your buyer persona is nearly complete!
You now just need to get it down on paper. To help you out getting started with this, we thought we’d share the template we have created to build customer personas for Bold and our clients.
