A customer persona is an archetype of a broad segment of your audience. Therefore, customer persona marketing is a way to sell directly to a homogeneous group of your audience. A persona is a marketing tool that allows us to get a clearer idea of who we are targeting when preparing marketing materials. Typically, we define a specific person as our ideal audience. We then extrapolate information about their desires, motivations, and past. They are often described in terms of demographic and psychographic information.
Here are some of the benefits of personalized marketing:
It allows brands to recognize critical traits of their audience.
Marketers have a deeper understanding of their base.
With this knowledge, brands can general manager email lists cater to different buyer personas. This practice is opposed to wasting precious time and resources on strategies that won't work.
Customer Persona Marketing Vs. Market Segmentation
This may all sound like old-fashioned segmentation. Although related, you could say that persona marketing is the evolution of segmentation. Udacity's Geoffrey Moore provides an excellent explanation of how not to confuse personas with market segmentation.
What is the difference between persona marketing and market segmentation?
Personalized customer marketing relies on psychology. Segmentation is based on factors such as age, gender, and social status. Segmentation is based on factors such as age, gender, and social status.
Buyer personas come from real people. Instead of crunching numbers on a particular demographic, these personas come from real-life buyer patterns. This makes it much easier to create content based on the wants and needs of real customers.
Segmentation is just the starting point. Recognizing that heterogeneous groups exist is the first step in serving them. A customer persona has already identified the personality traits of more homogeneous groups.
Customer Persona Example
What a Customer Persona Buyer Profile Should Look Like
Here are some of the key elements a buyer persona should have:
Background. Background can include different demographics, such as age and gender. Talk to your regular customers and find out what their professions are, as there can be connecting factors. The more information you have, the better!
Goals. What short- and long-term goals does this particular group have? This knowledge can be essential when it comes to customer persona marketing, as it points to the aspirational.
Values. Knowing what is important to your customers in terms of values is essential to speaking to them on their terms.
Challenges. What are the problems in their daily lives? You should look for ways to tailor your product and voice to your customers' specific needs and challenges.
Customer Profile
Where to Find the Right Data to Create Customer Profiles
A good starting point is to create personas from real data based on current customers, surveys, analytics, and social media. It's important to build a profile of several people who fit your brand, keeping in mind that every person is different. The goal is to find the similarities in a group of people who fit the brand best.
Social media. Social media is the most obvious place to find information about your potential buyers and current customers.
Keyword research. While keyword research is often associated solely with search engine optimization, it can also help brands learn about their customers. By looking at how visitors search for what you offer, you can figure out how to market to them. Are they searching for your product name + shipping? They might value fast shipping over other factors like price or entertainment.
Facebook Insights. This tool will allow you to see what content users respond to the most and how. Knowing what types of posts and ads generate engagement is a great brand to follow. Facebook contains a lot of information about user data, so it's also a great place to cross-reference demographics.
Old-fashioned comments. You can host focus groups, interviews, or surveys to ask customers about their experiences with your brand.
