When it comes to customer service and marketing, knowing your audience is everything. Customers aren’t a concept – they’re real people with personalities, needs and expectations, and knowing how to cater to them is integral to your success. Creating detailed personas will show you where and how to best reach your target audience, and it can also help you build an effective customer journey map.
What is a customer persona?
A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. Make it believable, as though you were describing a real person. Give them a background, outline their attitude, identify their motives, and figure out their negative triggers. You can even give the persona a name.
Here are a few specifics to include in your customer persona:
- Age
- Education
- Goals
- Income
- Interests
- Location
- Needs
- Size of household
Note that you’ll probably create more than one customer persona to accurately represent the different people who form your primary audience.
How do I add depth to a customer persona?
There’s almost no way to add too much detail to a customer persona. By narrowing their traits, you’ll be able to target only the customers who will have a genuine interest in your brand. Dive deeper by answering questions like these:
- What age are they at each of the touch points of the customer journey?
- What is their biggest struggle when it comes to reaching their goals?
- Aside from subjects within your niche, what other interests do your customers have? Where, when and how often do they engage with their interests?
- Which social media platforms are they using and how are they using them?
Is there any help out there for creating customer personas?
If you’re struggling with answering the basic questions, or if you have the general descriptors down but don’t know how to add depth to them, there are several ways to more accurately identify your audience.
Market segmentation will help you divide your market into smaller, more identifiable segments, which could help you create more distinct personas. You can also interview your best customers; send surveys or take polls through email or social media marketing; and look closely at your stats from your different social media platforms.
Your customers are the most important people to your business. By creating personas, you’re able to appeal to their empathy, build stronger relationships and directly appeal to their motivations. To learn more about Personas, watch a recording of the West webcast: No More Stilted Robotic Conversations: 5 Steps to Smooth Dialogue
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