Your digital marketing agency wants to develop customer personas ahead of a new marketing campaign set to launch in a few weeks. You are not so sure it’s necessary. You’re thinking you might want them to get straight to the campaign and not worry about the customer personas. Is that wise?
In order to make that decision, you need to know a little bit more about customer personas. You cannot make an informed decision if you don’t know what’s on the table. With that said, there are four things to know about customer personas discussed below. If you understand all four things and still believe they are not worth the time and effort, by all means proceed straight to your marketing campaign.
1. What They Are
Some of the resistance to customer personas is due to a lack of understanding. In other words, companies do not know what they are, let alone why they are valuable.
A customer persona is a fictional profile of a typical customer likely to be interested in the company’s products or services. Because not every customer is exactly alike, marketers tend to want to develop multiple personas in order to develop a more well-rounded picture.
Webtek Digital Marketing delivers SEO, web development, and digital marketing services to clients around the country. Not only do they develop customer personas, but they also use them for their own marketing campaigns. Customer personas help them understand their own clients, be they small business owners, corporate marketing executives, or sole proprietors.
2. How They Are Developed
Customer personas are developed through research and data analysis. The marketer starts with a basic understanding of the types of customers who buy from the business in question. From there, research provides actionable data that can be plugged into customer profiles to create multiple personas.
Customer profiles can be as basic as fictional name, age, sex, and occupation. But they can also be more detailed. They can cover everything from buying preferences to personal interests.
3. Where the Data Comes From
A digital marketer’s data sources ultimately determine the accuracy of the resulting customer personas. Most marketers start with keyword research. That research tells them how customers go about searching for the client’s products or services. Keywords like ‘discount’ and ‘cheap’ indicate that customers don’t want to spend a lot of money.
From there, marketers can branch out to other data sources. They may research data on social media sites. They may conduct customer surveys. Wherever they can find information pertaining to those customers most likely to buy products and services is on the table.
4. How They Help Marketing Efforts
The fourth and final thing to know about customer personas is the icing on the cake: how they help marketing efforts. The primary benefits derived from customer personas are rooted in a principal known as ‘segmentation’.
Let us say your company sells a product geared toward workers fast approaching retirement age. That particular demographic can be broken down into smaller segments based on income, age, geographic location, and so forth. The point of segmentation is to fine-tune your marketing efforts so that you are targeting an audience with the most potential.
In essence, customer personas bring life to segmentation. They add names and faces that help marketers more easily connect with customers in a particular segment. In so doing, marketers are better able to understand what makes those customers tick.
Customer personas are just one tool in the digital marketer’s toolbox. When utilized properly, they can help a lot. They can help marketers make the most of their efforts by targeting audiences with excellent precision.
