“Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her to solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.” – Brian Tracy
Your product or service will appeal to many people for many different reasons. People will buy into different attributes. Although the personas may all be connected by a common need or similar problem the way they approach it, their attitude towards it and their usage may be very different.
When looking at marketing strategy in three phases: diagnosis, strategy and tactics, persona and targeting are a significant part of the strategic consideration. It is therefore imperative brands identify, understand, and ideally size personas. The brand may not decide to target all the personas it recognises but it must appreciate them. The decision to NOT target a specific persona is a strategic choice in itself.
Here are ten reasons why marketers need customer personas:
1. Targeted marketing – by understanding the varying needs, preferences, motivations and drivers of the different people who will be interested in your product or service you can gain clarity of where and how to reach them with your communication messaging and how to tailor that messaging for best effect, thereby improving your return on advertising spend (ROAS).
2. Improving customer experience – each persona is likely to have a different customer journey to and with your product. By understanding personas you can start to understand customer journeys, and then optimise them with the objective of increasing customer satisfaction across the course of interaction with and using your brand.
3. Customer insight – Continuous monitoring and analysis of customer personas (market orientation) can yield valuable insights into up-and-coming (as well as diminishing) trends, customer behaviours and emerging opportunities. Having visibilities of these market dynamics enables a company to adjust its plans to stay relevant.
4. Strategic decision marking – Persona can be segmented into different groups. The segments may shop in different ways informing your distribution strategy, they may absorb media in different ways impacting your media strategy, and they may have different levels of response to the different sales techniques, therefore informing your pricing and sales strategy.
5. Media planning – When planning paid media and promotional activities, personas help marketers choose the most effective mediums for reaching them, this can lead to optimisation in advertising spend (ROAS again).
6. Content creation – Persona-based marketing allows brands to define key messages and messaging hierarchies, making communication more effective and more likely to resonate and trigger the targeted personas, resulting in more effective customer engagement.
7. New product development – When a company truly understands its target personas it can aid in product and service design, be it for new products or brand extensions. This helps eliminate risk, by ensuring that the product is designed with the customer's need/desire at the heart.
8. Competitor advantage – By deeply understanding personas, a company can also gain an insight into how the customers are likely to feel about, purchase and interact with competitor products. This intelligence can be used in war-game scenarios to help win more customer hearts, minds and conversions and gain competitive advantage and/or market share.
9. Measurement and optimisation – Key performance indicators can be set against different personas and individual persona strategies developed. For example, hold share of persona A, increase sales contribution from persona B, diverse persona C and move resources into persona D which is growing. Having specific objectives and measuring them can help in measuring strategic as well as campaign success.
10. Customer retention – Understanding customer personas and their journeys and being able to react accordingly based on measurement can increase a company’s chance of retaining customers. Customer retention is well-documented as being much cheaper than customer acquisition.
To summarise, customer personas are invaluable to marketers in helping them tailor their marketing and communication strategy to drive customer engagement and ultimately business and brand growth. Personas bridge the gap between a brand's offering and its customer's needs.
If you need help identifying your customer personas, or if you have personas but want some assistance to optimise their usage please get in touch.