Increase Your Clients’ Marketing ROI by Creating Focused Customer Personas

The key to selling anybody anything is first understanding them, which is why customer personas are so important.

Who are your clients’ customers? What are their demographics? What drives them? What are their typical buying behaviors? The more you understand your clients’ customers, the more likely you are to connect your client with them and not only make sales but build customer loyalty over time.

There is a whole lot that goes into this, but one tool you do not want to overlooks is building customer personas.

Defining Customer Personas

A customer/buyer persona (also known as a customer avatar) is a representation of an ideal client as a fictional person. You give attributes to the persona that would be possessed by the ideal customer in that segment. So, you give them a name, a gender, an age, challenges, goals, business title (if B2B) and more. Most of your clients probably have multiple segments of customers, so that means you need multiple customer personas.

Because your client has different target customers, you should flesh out multiple customer personas, sometimes even for the same type of sale. For example, if you sell to corporations where the CEO and the CFO must approve the sale, you would create a customer persona for each because their goals, challenges, desires and ambitions are not the same.

Why You Should Create Customer Personas

If you have never created and used buyer personas before, you may not understand why it is worth the time to create them.

1. Market to a “person” rather than an idea: When planning marketing strategies, it’s just a whole lot easier to picture Emily, the 45-year-old software CFO who is concerned with reducing costs and likes to go to ballet galas and art events than it is to market to faceless, nameless CFOs.
2. Increase revenue and interest: Many companies have greatly increased their ROI using customer personas. For example, Marketing Sherpa has a case study that demonstrates use of customer personas resulted in a

• 900% increase in length of website
• 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue
• 111% increase in email open rate
• 100% increase in the number of web pages visited

3. Make better business decisions: If you did your job when creating your clients’ customer personas, the personas will help you immensely in gaining an understanding of their customers and customizing your clients’ marketing strategies and product development for better results.
4. Provide more complete answers: Content marketing is critical these days. When you have buyer personas always in mind, you are much more likely to realize what questions your clients’ customers want answers so you can answer them. You can better focus content to be relevant to your clients’ ideal buyers.
5. Prioritize and determine spend: When you have clear customer personas that represent your clients’ most ideal customers, it suddenly becomes much easier to decide the direction of marketing campaigns – and how much to spend on each.
6. Personalized, focused marketing is more effective: It’s scripture that the more focused your marketing is, the more effective it is. The days of the broad shotgun approach are gone. To be successful, you must focus each campaign on a particular demographic, especially when we are talking B2B and high-end items. The closer you can hone your message to your clients’ customers concerns and desires, the more effective your marketing campaigns will be.

It All Starts with Research

Even though personas humanize your clients’ ideal customers, they should be based firmly on research and hard data. Hopefully you have been gathering data for some time about your clients’ market segments both demographic and behavioral. You can conduct further research through surveys, interviews, social media polls and other methods.

Key in on the Right Questions

Though you need to start with data, you can’t just string together a lot of data points and have an effective customer persona. Do what you can to humanize them. Give them a name. Create a story.

Start with basic demographics like age, gender, location, income and education. For a B2B business, and sometimes even for B2C, you want to know job title and industry.

Add any behavioral data you have such as how your clients’ customers behave online such what their journey looks like, what kinds of sites they come from and what they buy. Consider their goals, challenges and ambitions. You will want to look at the characteristic of customers who help your client’s business. You probably want to represent people who buy a lot and buy frequently from the client. Perhaps you want to see how long-time customers vary from recent ones. There might be certain characteristics shared by customers who give your client a lot of referrals. Certainly, you want to know what kinds of media they are active in so you know the best way to reach them with your messages. Are they active on LinkedIn? TikTok? Or maybe they listen to business podcasts or even talk radio. Even think about their hobbies and outside interests.

Once you get past basic questions, think about questions related to the client’s industry and business.

Don’t be vague. You need to get as specific as you possibly can when creating these personas.

Tools to Create Customer Personas

You don’t need to start from scratch developing customer personas. You need to think this out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use tools. Here are some of them (though some of these do a lot more than help you create personas):

• HubSpot Make My Persona
• Userforge persona creator template and builder tools
• Akoonu
• Xtensio user persona template
• Inflow’s persona topic matrix

Need Help Creating Customer Personas and Developing Marketing Strategy? Contact Umbrella

A solid strategy is behind every great marketing campaign, and customer personas help you get there.  If you want help developing customer personas and marketing strategies for your clients, contact Umbrella for a free consultation through the website or call us at 1 (866) 760-2638.