A customer persona is a fictional character that represents your target market. If you have a segmented market, you’ll want to have a persona for each segment. The more information your have about your target market, the more detail you can add, and the more useful the persona will be. Data points include:
- Demographics: age, job, income, location, education, ethnicity, and family status.
- Psychographics: likes, dislikes, values, interests, motivations, frustrations.
- Social: how they interact with friends, how they use leisure time, how they identify within social groups.
- Behavioral: purpose of and how they interact with your business, previous purchases, purchase process preferences, desktop or mobile.
The persona should describe a typical customer. Statistical averages, like the average age, are not helpful. If your two segments are pre-teens and middle-aged adults, the average age is going to be about 30, which is an entirely different segment. For marketing purposes, your persona has to be truly representative.
Given a name, your persona comes to life and now you are focused on “Donna” to:
- Refine your marketing strategy: In our recent series, we reviewed the buying cycle and how to market at each phase along the customer’s path. Now you can refine those general strategies for Donna specifically. What’s going to get Donna’s attention? What motivates Donna to seek your products or services? What will Donna want to know about the product or service before she makes a decision to buy? How do you keep Donna as a long-term customer?
- Create compelling ads: What values do you want to convey to Donna? What emotions do you want to evoke? What will trigger Donna to move to the next phase in the buying cycle?
- Create meaningful content: Donna’s a well educated professional in the business world. She wants information that is concise and precise. She’s also concerned about the environment, so your website needs to address what you’re doing to be good environmental stewards. Donna also wants to ensure that her high-end suits aren’t being made by young children, so you need to tell her that. We know that Donna likes to travel, so you could have a page about the locations from which you source your fabrics, and maybe a blog post about how silk is made.
Personas are a way to get into the mind-set of your customers. So, what’s your Donna like?
