What is a customer persona?
A Customer Persona (also called Buyer Persona) is a semi-fictional representative of your target group and the personification of your desired customer. Unlike the pure target group, which segments the entire market and is a rough outline of your customer group, the customer persona gives this group a specific and clear face.
The Customer Persona supports your company in a variety of areas: As a target audience, it is an integral part of inbound marketing as part of storytelling and content creation, or also helps to adapt the services or products you offer.
Who, how, what?
There are basic questions you need to answer to create your Customer Persona. Start with the basic framework conditions: Is my customer a private person or a company, i.e. B2C or B2B? What are the demographic facts (age, place of residence, occupation, income, gender, hobbies)? What is the inner attitude and what are the moral values of my persona? – As soon as you have recorded the answers to these first questions about the persona’s life situation, it is time to go into more depth.
Under all circumstances, you need to know what the core problem of your persona is, how your offer can solve this problem and what needs can be covered by it. Only when you are aware of this you will be able to design and adapt your offer in a target-oriented way. Existing offers can be extended or removed from your service portfolio if they do not fit your customer persona.
No advertising for lipsticks in Men’s Health
Find out which decision factors are most important for your persona before making a purchase. This includes the technical and visual attributes of your offer as well as the information sources of the persona: If your persona is a young woman between 18 and 29, it makes little sense to advertise your offer in a magazine like “Men’s Health”.
The next step is to become aware of the buying behaviour of your persona: whether they prefer to buy online or stationary and whether there are moral standards that you must adhere to in order to sell your product. If these are met by your offer, you should also emphasize this. The language of your persona also plays an important role in marketing: formal and adequate or informal and intuitive? Adapt your wording accordingly.
Numbers work wonders
All this information is only useful if you know where to find the facts about your customer persona without making any assumptions.To do this, analyze your existing statistics and figures precisely; for example, the visitor information of your website (Google Analytics can be used). For further information gathering and identification of your target persona, consult especially those departments and team areas that have the most customer contact. This gives you insights and knowledge that are difficult to capture and express by looking at the “raw” numbers, such as the language of your customers.
Who doesn’t ask, stays clueless
Last but not least, don’t be afraid to approach your customers directly. Interviews and direct enquiries about needs and wishes are the quickest way to reach your goal – Communication is key. Through direct communication and interaction, you will learn things that would otherwise go through your fingers.
The interviews do not have to take the form of a classic, direct conversation, but can also take place through questions on channels such as your own website within the storytelling. You will then receive the answers in the comment column.
Every hero needs an antagonist
In addition to your ideal customer, you can develop an anti-persona: A person whom you do not want to or cannot address under any circumstances. Experience has shown that the clear formulation of things you do not want to stand for under any circumstances helps you to finalise and perfect your offers.
Bottom line:
As a personification of your ideal customer, a customer persona significantly supports your company in understanding your customers in depth and in adapting both your offer and your marketing optimally to the coveted market.
The following steps will help you to define and identify the customer persona of your company:
- consideration of the analytic facts and statistics related to your persona
- what is the attitude towards life and what are the values of your persona?
- conversation and interaction with current and sought-after customers
- elaboration of demographic facts
- differentiation of the decision factors & information sources of your persona
- gathering and shaping the customer persona: give the data a face
Bonus: Development of an “anti-persona” for additional clarification of your offer.
You can see the added value of your own Customer Persona, but are not so good with (fictitious) people? Then simply contact us.