How Important is Customer Persona for your Business?

The world has gone digital, so goes the refrain. As per statistics, around 4.54 billion people comprising 59 percent of the global population, were active internet users as of January 2020. So, with so much traffic moving the digital way, are enterprises on the digital platform happily going to the bank? The answer is – it depends. With competition in the digital ecosystem growing at a humongous rate – at last count, the total number of websites globally was more than a billion (source: millforbusiness.com), getting traffic to a specific site can be a challenge. This is where digital marketing services can help matters by increasing the visibility of a site through SEO and other activities. Its all about being in the top section of search results to draw the elusive customer traffic. So, what does it take to drive traffic to one’s site, besides, of course, strictly implementing the SEO services? It is about creating a customer persona.

What is a customer persona in digital marketing?

In a competitive business environment where customers have their typical preferences changing from day to day, product to product, and brand to brand, enterprises should work on creating the customer persona. A customer persona in the context of marketing is about identifying the type of buyers based on the attributes or activities such as; demographic, values, need for the product, location, shopping pattern, and interest in the product, among others. It is the holistic profile of customers that provides insights into their psyche about what triggers or drives their buying decisions.

A customer persona is critical to digital marketing as it drives the right audience to a website based on the messaging that aligns with what the customer feels or wants. It provides a wealth of information about the target audience and allows the support, sales and marketing teams to align their activities with the organization’s goals.

Using customer personas by digital marketing services can lead to the following outcomes:

Driving the right traffic to your website where customers would be genuinely looking for your offerings
Planning the right marketing strategies to augment sales
Generate qualified leads for the sales team to convert
Gives an idea about the type of marketing content to produce, the type of product or service to develop, or the media organizations to approach

How to create customer personas?

Since customer personas vary from industry to industry and location to location, creating the ideal one ultimately boils down to how an organization monitors and stores data pertaining to a potential customer. Also, one needs to ask the right questions to the right people to create impactful personas. Since refining personas can be time-consuming, it would make sense to follow the below-mentioned process at the initial stage itself.

# Conducting Interviews: It is better to consult the teams that have an interface with the customer – sales, customer support etc. Take them into confidence about the process and ask them relevant questions like –

Why do customers choose our products or services over their competitors?
What aspects of our product or service customers mostly complain about?
What kind of customers mostly purchase our products – teenagers, middle-aged, seniors?
Which web pages get the maximum impression?
Which blogs get the maximum traffic?
What skillsets do the customers need to use our product or service?
What is the general feedback about our product or service?
What are the frequent questions asked by potential customers?

# Communicating with customers: In addition to your in-house team, the real customers would give the right answers as far as formulating customer personas is concerned. So, ask questions covering areas such as –

Buying habits, shopping behaviour, and technology skills
Pain points while handling the product and how fast the issues are resolved
Careers, education, experience, and job titles
Hobbies, aspirations, and frustrations

# Compiling information: The information gathered from in-house teams and customers should be compiled along with the hard data collected by the web tools. The latter shall show the commonalities that customers have among them – habits, shopping trends, aspirations, pain points etc.

Conclusion

In the competitive world of business where driving customers to a brand or website can be a challenge, creating customer personas seems to be the right way to follow. They help align your organizational goals to the needs of the customers. Customer personas offer insights into what goes through the minds of customers before they take a buying decision. As a powerful tool, these can lead to better returns. Should you have difficulty in making your website visible and generating leads, approach a professional agency offering digital marketing services.