By using business insights and customer data, you can create a semi-fictional character called the customer persona or the ‘buyer persona’. Constructing a customer persona allows you to gain deeper insights into the most valuable qualities that make up your target audience.
Once you have an established customer persona, you can better understand how your customers think, what they do, how you can solve their problems or make life easier for them.
Understanding customers is the number one priority when interacting with them. It gives your brand personality and brings customer groups to life, which helps to direct thinking and drum up conversations within your business. By doing this, your brand will always ensure that the customer is at the forefront of everything you do. You want to know what makes them tick, so that you can understand their wants, needs and desires. Without this, you’re going to have a tough time appealing to them – and a lot of assumptions will have to be made.
Quick exercise: creating your customer persona
If you’ve got a new product or promotion, make sure everything you do is with the end-user in mind.
Give it a go – try answering the questions below to see how well you understand your customer persona.
- How old is your customer?
- Where do they live?
- What do they want more or less of?
- Do they have children?
- What are their hobbies?
- What are their values?
- What’s their profession?
- What’s their estimated income?
- Which social media platform do they use most?
- What do they read?
- Do they go to any industry events?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What challenges do they face?
- How do other people see them?
- What might stop them from purchasing/investing?
How to gain customer persona information
If you can’t answer all the questions above, that’s OK, there are ways you can gain more insights into your audience. And you will want to because the more you know, the easier you will find it to connect to them, which means your new product, service or promotion will be harder for them to ignore.
- Speak with your sales team
The sales team spend plenty of time speaking to clients, so where better to gather this essential information? It’s likely that the salespeople have spoken to clients about general life, as well as business, which means we have the information at our fingertips, we just need to collate it. - Conduct customer surveys
Most customers love to be asked their opinion on something, and chances are, they’re not going to hold back. Conducting customer surveys can help you to shape your customer persona and offers you a chance to improve the brand. - Speak with customer service departments
Customer service departments will know what questions are frequently asked – so go right to the source. By understanding what your customer FAQs are, you can make your sales copy clearer, your product better and your campaign more effective.
Create your customer persona
Once you have gathered as much information as possible, it’s time to find the correlations in your data. From there, you’ll be able to zero in on your brand’s most ideal customer and focus your efforts on speaking directly to them.