Why does my business need customer personas?
Knowing what your potential customers need means that you can tailor your offering to suit them. In an increasingly digitalised world, our clients are becoming more remote. There is now less face-to-face interaction, so if we can pre-empt what someone visiting your site or reading your marketing might require, you can save time and money and provide a higher level of service.
Understanding different customer needs also helps with your marketing strategy. If your client base doesn’t use Facebook, for example, it seems like a no-brainer to spend marketing funds elsewhere; you probably wouldn’t want to advertise a hearing aid company on Instagram because the customer age demographic wouldn’t necessarily use that platform.
Who is your ideal customer? What would they be looking for if they were searching for your business on Google?
For many of us, our businesses offer a variety of services; for example, Not Another Marketing Agency offers integrated marketing, which incorporates everything from writing strategies to managing social media. This means that we have to consider the different types of marketing requests that might come through the website. This is where customer personas become vital.
A customer persona is a semi-fictional character based on existing clients and market research. Many businesses will have multiple customer personas which incorporate motivations, demographics, goals, and behaviour patterns. A customer persona for my business, for example, could be an SME that is looking to expand and doesn’t know what they should do on Twitter. Or it could be a CEO of a large blue-chip company that already has marketing in place, but wants to change its strategy.
By understanding what each persona needs, I can empathise with them and ensure that they receive the best possible service from me.
PPC Campaigns
Understanding what a potential client is looking for means that you can efficiently choose the right keywords and content to suit their needs. This is where personas can really help with paid advertising on Google.  Providing your potential customer with the information that they require, at their fingertips, makes it far easier to convert an enquiry into a sale.
Understanding their pain points
The best salespeople will tell you that to get the order, you have to identify the customer’s pain point and solve it for them. Understanding why someone has chosen to approach your business is key to converting business. Think about car manufacturers. They have multiple pain points that they need to solve, from someone wanting a new car because their next-door neighbour has just bought the latest model of a top marque to a stressed-out mum who needs to fit two kids, a dog and a pushchair in their car. They are both looking to buy a car but will walk into a different showroom if they can’t see a solution to their problems. Creating customer personas allows you to prepare your sales team for every eventuality.
For us, creating customer personas is integral to the success of any marketing campaign that we work on. If you would like to sit and chat about your client base and create more effective campaigns, get in touch.
