by: Jack Harwell, Kansas SBDC
Think you know your customer? If you haven’t developed your customer persona, you may not know them well enough.
In fact, without a customer persona, you could be wasting marketing dollars directing the wrong message to the wrong crowd. Every business should develop a customer persona so they can design targeted messaging that resonates with their intended audience.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a fictional character that represents the essential characteristics of your ideal customer. The persona is described using information about the ideal customer’s age, sex, education, and other demographic information. To fully understand the customer persona, you should also include psychographic information such as how they are feeling, where they are going, and what is important to them.
Most companies today use customer personas in their marketing efforts – many have more than one. RadioShack had five personas. One of their personas was a 50-something man (I called him a curmudgeon) who likes to spend hours in his basement soldering electronic gadgets. His name was Bob. Another persona – Sally – was a young mother who spends most of her time taking care of the children and her household. She picks her children up at school and drops them off at after-school activities, using the latest technology to help her keep up with her hectic schedule.
We had life-sized, standup posters depicting Bob, Sally, and the other personas. These folks stood silently in the marketing conference room while we debated the details of our next great marketing campaign. Questions like “what would Bob say?”, or “do you think Sally will go for it?”, were commonplace as we refined our marketing message. The team would often realize that we weren’t ready to run with our plans because they didn’t quite resonate with the intended persona.
Start With Your Core Persona
If you’re already in business, choose a few of your most valuable customers – customers that buy the most, are your best advocates, and seem to enjoy doing business with you. Start building your core persona by describing what sets them apart from your other, less productive customers.
An effective persona identifies the following:
Basic Demographics | What is their age, education level, marital status, occupation, household income, etc. Number of children living at home? Grandchildren? Do they rent or own their home? |
General Psychographics | Goals and challenges, what is busiest part of their day, when is the best time to relax, when do they shop, what keeps them up at night. |
Industry-specific Preferences | What is their primary pain point that you are solving, how they use the product/service, what they expect from customer service. |
Shopping Behaviors | Favorite social media platform, favorite shopping experience, how do they learn about products/services before purchasing, relative importance of price-quality-availability, do they consider online reviews before purchase |
It’s important not to make any assumptions here – your persona should be based on facts. Ask your customers if you don’t already know. You should regularly talk to your customers anyway, so just add a few directed questions that will elicit insights that can be added to their persona.
If you haven’t started your business yet, it is critical that you put extra effort into defining who will be your customer. Because you don’t currently have a customer database to learn from, this will require a different approach. Start with identifying your unique selling proposition – your secret sauce. Then research your competitors to understand how you differentiate your product/service from the others. This should provide insight into what will compel your new customers to choose to do business with you, leading to the construction of your customer persona.
The customer persona built on the assumptions of your business model will need to be validated. Conducting primary research such as customer focus groups, competitor observations, and conversations with employees, vendors, and others in the market is recommended. The more you can verify that your customer persona works for your business – and the market has plenty of these customers – the more solid your business plan.
Your core persona should represent most of your customers. This is the first and maybe the only persona a business needs. However, there may be situations that require more than one persona.
Multiple Personas
If you have a complex purchase process, serve more than one customer base, or want to launch a new product or service, you may find the need for more than one persona.
If your customers are businesses, there may be several people involved in the sales cycle. I once had a client who served Medicaid patients under a contract with the state. It turns out that the customer persona we were looking for was the administrator of the Medicaid provider contracts, the physician’s assistant that referred clients, and the end user. All three customer personas were needed for this business to effectively market to all their customers.
If you are planning to launch a new product, you should confirm that the product will resonate with your core customer persona. If not, and that is your growth strategy, you should develop a new persona to reflect the new market you are targeting.
If your growth plans include appealing to a new type of customer than you’ve traditionally served, then an aspirational customer persona might be in order.
Share Your Persona
The customer persona is not something you relegate to the desk drawer once completed. It is one of the strategic cornerstones of your business and should be integrated into your business processes.
Use it as a touchstone to validate all interactions with the customer and to design a product or service process that will thrill your customers. Use it for training of all employees – not just those that interact with customers. Most background processes have the potential to ultimately affect the customer either positively or negatively. With your customer persona looking over their shoulders, employees are more likely to get it right.
It is essential that you share your persona with your marketing team because all social media messaging should be directed toward your customer persona. This is especially true when some or all your marketing is outsourced.
When your customer personas are included in a business plan, the reader will see that you’ve done your homework and you have a good grasp on the market you are entering.
Tweak Your Personas Over Time
The customer persona should not be a static document. It should change over time to reflect changes in the market or your business model. When you notice trends in your customer profile, when you launch new products or services or if you notice a decline in the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, you should conduct a full review of your customer persona to make sure it still reflects the realities of your market.
Learn More
To learn more about your persona, get a few of them in the room and ask them to share how they are feeling, where they are going, and what is important to them.
The business advisors at the Kansas SBDC at JCCC can assist you in building your customer persona.
