Editorial
The Gist
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Connecting with people. Purchasing decisions include real human motivations, values and pain points. Personas allow connecting with customers on a more personal level.
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Alignment guarantees shared success. A shared understanding of your ideal customer creates internal alignment across departments.
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Realizing customer value. The more intimately you know your customer, the greater the opportunity to drive increased, lasting customer value and personalized experiences.
Companies tie their success to their direct ability to understand and meet the evolving needs of customers. Understanding brings personalization, and personalization effectively drives long-term relationships, customer loyalty and brand advocacy. Customer personas are a crucial tool that market-leading companies use to achieve this success.
How well do you know your customers, their reasons for purchasing from you and the meaningful ways that they use your products or services? You’d be surprised that many companies cannot fully or accurately answer these questions.
Personas help segment and humanize your customer, and they allow your internal partners and teams to have a full 360-degree perspective of your customer. Personas extend well beyond basic demographics and provide you with invaluable insights into buying behaviors, triggers and pain points. Personas also help you understand your ideal customers’ challenges and effectively align your brand and value proposition to address those challenges.
A robust, dynamic persona program will help drive your market differentiation strategy and position your brand as a market preferred solution for your target customers. Let’s dive deeper into customer personas and explore why they’re important and how they can create lasting value for your customers.
Table of Contents
- Understanding the Importance of Customer Personas
- How Personas Drive Customer Value and Loyalty
- Steps for Creating Effective and Engaging Personas
- Using Personas to Gain a Competitive Advantage
- Core Questions Around Personas
Understanding the Importance of Customer Personas
Customer personas are a highly valuable, critical tool and they’re a necessary component of a strong customer segmentation and personalization strategy. Why segment? If your company is like most, not every customer is the same. Your customers could be very different from each other in countless ways. They may vary in revenue, size, location, working capital and decision capabilities. Personas help marketers and sales leaders segment the customer base in ways that allow tailored engagement by customer type.
Personas are slightly fictional but highly representative of your ideal customer. If you segment your customers, then it’s a good operating practice to have a persona for each. The best personas are structured and formatted in a way that’s easy to read, interpret, use and update.
Why are customer personas so important? Essentially, personas bring the customer to life, and they personalize your customer. Personas compel a company to think beyond their product or service and ask themselves, “Why does a customer want to purchase from us?” Personas are a great tool to answer the ever important question, “Do you know your customer?”
Well-structured personas and their content provide two key benefits. They allow all internal departments to align on a shared customer view. Also, they humanize the customer and transcend data points and metrics. Personas guide additional decision-making in areas such as campaign development, product launches and strategic planning.
Related Article: 5 Ways Data-Driven Insights Are Reshaping Customer Segmentation
How Personas Drive Customer Value and Loyalty
The most effective companies that drive true, lasting value are the ones that treat their customers like people and focus on serving their long-term needs. Personas create endless customer value because they’re designed to go beyond surface-level characteristics and delve much deeper.
Here are a few areas that I consider when drafting my personas:
Get Motivated
Do you know why your customers are motivated to purchase from you? Are those motivations consistent across your customer base? Personas help rationalize the human aspects of the buy decision and identify integral human emotions, which play an important part in most buying decisions.
Relationships Matter
Many will tell you that the best customer relationships are the ones that are long-term and mutually beneficial. Shape your personas to go beyond the product or service and focus on building a lasting partnership. Most customers want to know that they can count on you and your company well after that purchase is made.
Use Customer Language
The tendency of most companies is to speak a language using terms and phrases unique to them and foreign to their customer base. Personas help shift that mindset. The best personas focus on words and phrases that resonate in the marketplace and enable a conversation that the customer best understands.
Steps for Creating Effective and Engaging Personas
Personas vary in length, content and detail. Commit to reviewing and updating them quarterly. Since market conditions fluctuate, quarterly reviews align with many other business review cycles. You can also take advantage of any adjustments made throughout the year. I’ve been successful with the following personas format.
Start With the Customer Profile
This section really sets up who your customer is, divided into a few key areas. Their demographic information lists details such as their age, title, income (or annual business revenue and any information related to their values and interests; think about their life outside of work).
Second, consider details related to their communication preferences and purchase history.
Lastly, touch on important insights related to their pain points and what problems they’re trying to solve. This could relate to increasing revenue, reducing operating expenses or improving brand loyalty.
Customer Insights Are Key
It’s imperative you focus on customers’ challenges of running their business. I recommend that you focus on revenue, expense, loyalty and market dynamics. Personas not only detail the challenges but also allow you to develop the key insights necessary to identify solutions.
Definitely Include Your Value Proposition
This aligns your branding and market position/differentiation with the customer’s primary buying or use needs. It effectively arms your teams with the key strategic talking points and messaging that translate a prospect conversation into a solution selling conversation.
Related Article: How to Use Customer Insights to Shape Product Strategy and Growth
Using Personas to Gain a Competitive Advantage
Customer personas are an integral part of your customer segmentation and customer journey strategy. Their effective use from creation, adaptation and execution will bring distinct competitive advantages to your company. Following the best practices mentioned above will help you establish a real sense of who your customer is, why they want to purchase from you and how you can effectively align your brand and value proposition to uniquely serve their needs.
Commit today to a customer-centric approach by developing and deploying a robust customer persona strategy. Delivering value is a competitive differentiator, and well-developed personas allow you and your company to stand apart in evolving, competitive markets.
Core Questions Around Personas
Editor's note: Here are two important questions to ask about customer personas:
What are customer personas and why are they important?
These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and market research. They go beyond basic demographics to include motivations, behaviors, pain points and challenges. Personas are crucial because they help marketers understand their customers better and enable alignment with customer needs.
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How can companies create effective customer personas?
Companies should start by profiling their customers with detailed demographic information, communication preferences and purchase history. They should also focus on understanding the challenges their customers face. Regular quarterly reviews and updates are also essential to keep personas relevant as market conditions change.
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