What is a customer persona?

Let’s start with the difference between customer segments and personas.

First, segmentation allows a brand to understand different sets or groups of customers. This might tell us where a particular group lives, their age range, and maybe even some of their typical buying behaviour. A customer persona, on the other hand, allows brands to better understand these homogenous groups, and to recognise key traits within them.

To create a representative sample of an audience, personas are based on the analysis and research of real customers.

This helps to build a much more detailed picture of the (hypothetical) customer, including far more emotive information such as:

• Personal motivations
• What they value in a brand
• What kind of communication they prefer, etc.

Brands are then able to take this insight and use it to deliver a much more relevant and less one-dimensional experience.

Watch this YouTube video where Dave Chaffey, author of Digital Marketing – Strategy, Implementation and Practice talks about Customer Personas (Duration 4m 37s). | Start Now |

How do we create customer personas?

You’re going to get to try this out soon, at your live event.

There are online tools and templates to help you, such as Xtensio.

Image: Xtensio customer persona example.

Typically, a customer persona will include:

• Name
• Background / career / family
• Demographics
• Identifiers / personality
• Goals
• Challenges
• Needs
• Sample quotes

This is known as the dimensions of a persona.

The process of producing personas is detailed below. One key point to take away is that they’re based on research, not guesswork.

1. Undertake market segmentation and identify target customers.
2. Engage in research to gain a deeper insight into your target customers.
3. Identify patterns in research.
4. Write a profile for a fictional person that embodies the prominent trends.
5. Design marketing messages to appeal to this person.

Examples of persona research:

• Keyword research
• Social media analytics
• Trends in CRM
• Information submitted in sign-up forms
• Interviews

Well-defined customer personas enable organisations to:

• Understand customer needs and interests
• Know where customers spend their time online
• Create content that appeals to the target audience
• Design products/services that are more closely aligned to what the target audience wants
• Generate better quality leads
• Increase efficiency
• Ensure consistency across the business

Information sources for personas

Keyword research is one effective tool for generating data, allowing brands to discover exactly what customers are searching for in relation to their product or website. For example, if a retailer discovers that a popular search term is its brand name alongside the word ‘discount’ or ‘offer’, it could be the case that customers value price over other factors like entertaining content or fast delivery – informing the ‘motivations’ part of a persona.

Social media is another important tool for establishing personas, with most platforms already having in-built analytics that can offer key data sets.

Facebook Insights, for example, allows brands to tap into how users are responding to ads, as well as what kind of content is generating the most engagement. By comparing this to specific user data, such as gender, relationship status and so on, brands are able to flesh out personas even more.

Finally, alongside data-driven tools, customer personas can also be largely influenced by surveys, feedback, and one-to-one interviews.

Task

Use one of the persona templates at Xtensio.com to create a customer persona. You can base it on yourself or someone you know, but make sure you use a fictitious name. | Link to Xtensio |