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Tips to Creating Customer Personas that Increase Campaign Effectiveness

By Don Potochny | February 3, 2017

Tips to Creating Customer Personas that Increase Campaign Effectiveness

Do you know your customers? The importance of understanding customer thoughts, feelings, motivations and, personalities is imperative to developing a strategic marketing plan.

Generic messaging isn’t an effective way to acquire new customers or market to your current customer base. These days, it’s all about delivering a customized message based on the needs of your target audience.

To do this, you need to create customer personas that resemble your ideal customer and group current customers and leads into categories based on each persona you create.

Relying solely on standard profile and purchase history information isn’t enough to develop customer personas strong enough to help you create customized messages. You really need to take the time to get to know them.

Most Companies Fail to Understand Customer Personas

A collaboration between market research firm Gleanster and marketing solutions provider Yesmail Interactive reached some interesting conclusions about customer personas. The two marketing agencies polled more than 100 senior-level marketers that worked at mid and large size companies in the B2C niche. The report revealed several glaring deficiencies that inhibit gaining insight into customer personalities.

First, most of the companies surveyed don't possess enough information to target customer prospects that want to buy similar products and services.

Second, instead of engaging customers in one-on-one live interactions, far too many of the companies relied on raw data to create customer personas.

Let's examine how creating customer personas helps you target the right customers.

One-on-One Interactions Matter the Most

You never learn what motivates your customers, until you spend a little time walking in their shoes. Even in a world of mass digitization, implementing the small business approach to creating customer personas goes a long way in helping you target customer prospects that share similar personas.

Do most of your customers make spur of the moment buying decisions? Do they meticulously ponder every feature of a product that you sell? Are most of your customers extroverts or do they tend to quietly spend time in your store looking for the right product? You get the most accurate glimpse into customer personas by interacting with them inside of your business.

Social Media Complements Personal Interactions

There's no denying the digitization of our culture has transformed customer personas. You can spend all day getting to know a customer and then at night, find yourself confounded by the customer's Facebook posts.

An astounding seven out of 10 marketers fail to glean insight from social media interactions. With the advent of Google and Facebook analytic tools, you have plenty of information to discover what drives your customers to make product and service purchases.

Moreover, social media opens the door to customer information that he or she might be reluctant to share with you in person. Use social media to refine the information you receive from interacting with customers in person.

The 20/80 Rule

You don't have the time and probably not the patience to learn what motivates all of your customers. The goal of creating customer personas isn't to list every personality trait of every customer that walks through your door.

Most business operators understand that a minority of their customers generate a majority of sales. However, did you know that about 20 percent of your customers produce nearly 80 percent of your sales?

To create accurate customer personas, you need to focus on getting to know the personalities of the 20 percent of customers that pay most of your bills.

Data Complements Personal Interactions

The Yesmail and Gleanster report study discovered most marketers have some understanding of the personalities that define their target customers. However, the study also demonstrates that business operators must go well beyond past purchases to learn about the thoughts, feelings, motivations, and personalities of their customers.

Data such as household demographics and channel-preference data complement the information you glean from customers during one-on-one interactions. Remember that data alone doesn't create customer personas; data acts as the mortar that cements your understanding of customer personalities.

Above all, challenge every assumption you form about your loyal customers. Never assume the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of your loyal customers remain consistent over the course of many years.

Consistently interact with your customers and you can expect to discover subtle changes in personality, which help you create accurate customer personas.

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Topics: Content Marketing

Don Potochny

Written by Don Potochny

SEO and Online Marketing Specialist