Customer Personas and Why They Are Important

What is a customer persona?

A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a marketing tactic, where a variety of different personas are created, who all share similar expectations, needs and problems, helping the company better identify and connect with their customers. A customer persona is often displayed in a visual & clear format, ensuring the information is clear, easily legible and easy to take in the information.

According to BlendB2B, depending on the business, there should be as few as one or two personas, or an many as 10 or 20. Personally, I think 4/5 is a more realistic number. With too many customer personas (10+), there can be a risk of the marketing and sales teams forgetting this information. Alternatively, the technique is no longer effective, because it becomes more difficult to make a personalised and effective strategy when too many personas are involved.

"56% of companies generated higher quality leads using buyer personas" Marketing Insider Group

Why is important to have a strong customer persona tactic?

Customer research and target audience research is a crucial part of business. If a brand/company does not understand it's customer, there is a high chance that not many customers will engage.

Customer personas allow a business to better understand their customer, particularly their wants and needs, which can allow for a more efficient and effective job of appealing to those specific desires. Customer personas has help steer a company in a correct, more precise path, helping to:

• attract and retain the correct customers

• help engage and connect with customers

• become a effective and efficient marketer

• focus on the customer problems and needs

• increase customer acquisition

• become a memorable company

• create loyal customers

"61% of global internet users research products online and are 57% of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a sales representative" Interconnected World: Shopping and Personal Finance

How to Develop a Strong Customer Persona:

The key to developing a strong customer persona is to gather lots of detailed relevant information on each individual. Examples of this can be:

Key Information: Name, Age, Marriage Status, Education, Occupation/Job Title, Location, Salary, Social Class.

Life Information: Lifestyle & Interests, Hobbies, Morals & Values, Purchasing Habits, Goals,

Customer Requirements: Pain points, Needs, Ideal User Experience

Buying Requirements: Professional/casual language, decision process, selling points.

I have created an example of a customer persona using the information previously mentioned below. I have created this from the perspective of a healthy takeaway brand.

As mentioned previously, customer personas are often quite visual to ensure the information is easily legible and efficient for someone to gather all information.

When writing a customer persona, it is always important to be as detailed and realistic as possible, in order to make them more effective and memorable for the marketing and sales team. A technique for ensuring these customer personas are easily memorable is for their names to include alliteration,  for example Busy Bella.

How to ensure customer personas are effective?

Refer to them regularly: It is important to always refer to these customer personas when making decisions, no matter how big or small. Whether it is a brand new global advertisement or a social post.

Refine and update regularly: Keeping up-to-date is important within all areas of business, particularly customer personas. People evolve and things change, so it is important to update the personas to keep them relevant. Furthermore, the target audience/company may have shifted, meaning that the product may no longer be completely relevant to that type of persona, leading to a full shift to a new character. These should be changed once per quarter to ensure both sales and marketing are on the same page when it comes to their customers.

"In the case of Thomson Reuter, buyer personas contributed to a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing, 10% increase in leads sent to sales, and a 72% reduction in lead conversion time." DemandGen Report

Conclusion: Why are customer personas so important?

Customer personas are important because it can help a business understand their customers better. It can make it easier to tailor more relevant messages, content, and services for your customers specific needs, behaviours and problems.

This is proven through statistics displayed throughout this post as proof of how effective customer personas can be. A personalised and experience is not only going to improve the customers first purchasing experience, but it will increase the chance of them repurchasing in the future, or recommending the service to their peers.

It is important to engage and fully understand your customer, particularly their pain points. Once you know their pain points, you can discover specifically HOW your product/service can impact their lives, and use this as a sales point.

If a business does not completely understand how their product can positively impact the lives of their customers, how can it be expected for the customer to understand?