What is the customer persona?
It is a research-based representation of your customers to understand their buying behavior. Businesses use customer persona to attract potential customers and retain them. Perfect customer persona will help you create a customized product, personalized solutions, and customer relationship management.
The answer to “what is customer persona” is straightforward. But, the million-dollar question is, ‘how to create this customer persona?’ A namesake stereotype customer persona will misdirect your entire business process. How to create a customer persona?
It would help if you had extensive research and analysis. Here is everything you need to know from data analysis to definition.
Types of buyer personas
Before you define a customer persona, it is essential to know that kind of persona. It is not a universal scale for representing personas, but a simple stencil for you to alter and define your business’ buyer persona.
In general, a business can identify personas in relation to cost (cost-oriented buyer and quality/trend buyer), impulse and research-oriented buyer, emotional and features-based buyer, prefer to shop online or offline and so on. Remember that it is perfectly normal for your business to have a unique type of buyer persona.
Data collection for generating buyer persona
There is no possible formula or short route to create a buyer persona. It is not wise to copy the buyer persona of your competitor or benchmark. The way your benchmarks/competitors define customer persona might be extremely out of context for your business, even if you are selling the same product or service.
Thus, data is critical. How to collect data for generating a buyer persona?
- Understand trends by finding the type of products purchased and the time of purchase.
- Create forms on your website to learn demographic information about your customers.
- Sales feedback will help you understand the requirements of different types of people
- You can also interview customers, conduct polls, and use other methods of data collection.
Why is customer persona important?
It is because they can provide in-depth information about your customers. The customer data does not offer persona information directly. You need to analyze and find patterns. You should be able to find important factors and segment your customers, and this will help you find your primary customer persona or multiple customer personas for your business.
6 Ways To Create customer persona
#1. demographic factors and identifiers
It is best to choose a data collection method, where you can communicate with the customers right after or before their purchase. Such a method will help you understand information way beyond demographics and backgrounds. Demographic factors include age, occupational details, gender, race, marital status, number of children, and others.
Background factors are similar to demographics, but more oriented to their purchase interest, like the type of products, time of purchase, their influencer, and so on. These are essential if you are looking to build a customer relationship.
#2. Track purchases
Step one allows you to understand the basic information about your customers. Now, it is time to compare it with your business. Choose purchase-end questionnaires to collect information about customers.
It will help you allocate the demographic factors to the type of products they buy, offers they look for, and so on. Remember to ask your customers what they expect from you, in an open-ended question.
#3. Create objectives
The first two steps help you segment your customers based on what they prefer and create a demographic background for each persona. Why is customer persona important, if you fail to generate a characteristic for those personas?
For instance, if your customers fall into two major categories as those who buy based on research done on the internet and those who follow trend/social influencer/media. Now, assign the demographics to them. Understand the age group, occupation level, gender, and other factors common in these segments.
It is possible to find many young buyers in the research-based persona and a few in the trend-follower. Some might be a good fit for both categories. It is a representation, and it is best to go with the significant factors.
#4. Craft marketing for each persona
The importance of customer persona is not just to document but to use it to make more profit. Now, Use the persona and find which product attracts each type of persona.
This strategy is what you need to share with the other departments. Your customer support department does not need to know about the customer persona but should know how to deal with a customer, who is above 50, female, and has an order of a high-value item.
These factors would fall under one of the personas you created. The marketing department will look at the buying behavior of that persona and utilize it in his conversation.
#5. Customize it and share it
Your marketing strategy for each persona should be coherent to the characteristics. Say, you have a discount offer, and you are looking for an excellent way to promote it. Learn the influencers or buying behaviors.
If one of your personas is a frequent Facebook user, your Facebook page is an excellent way to advertise. Now, create a marketing strategy for each persona and share it with your marketing team.
This strategy should include content formulation, ad style, and so on. The requirements of each persona should reach the production department as feedback. The emotional element of each persona should reach the customer relationship department to manage grievances.
#6. Repeat
Your customer persona from 2000 will not represent your current customer. At the same time, new technology or a sudden change in macro or micro-market factors might change customers’ mindsets.
Thus, the definition of buyer persona of your business might remain the same, but some of the factors might change. Therefore, keep a time frame for repeating the process to avoid becoming obsolete.
Do you believe that the definition of buyer persona, strategy creation, and modification of buyers based on the persona is just a waste of time? It is a buyer-centric market, where customers take only a few seconds to move to another brand or business.
In this world of online shopping, a human brain takes just three seconds to consider moving from one website to another. You might have a personalized business process to keep your customers’ attention, or you will become obsolete.
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