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Creating a Customer Persona for Your Business

Marketing and Branding | 0 comments

At this point in time, businesses of all sizes are turning to concrete analytics to drive their business decisions and improve overall growth. Today’s customers are used to being targeted in this way, which makes it important for brands to utilize this approach.
Creating the sense that your brand is catering specifically to each individual customer isn’t easy, but it gets easier with research. Creating a customer persona is an excellent place to start when it comes to reaching your target market. In this article, we will explore how to create your brand’s customer persona in order to better define your target market.

What is a Customer Persona?

Customer personas, often known as buyer personas, are distinct profiles that describe the individuals within your audience. These personas are a tool that is designed to help you recognize who you are marketing to—and understanding who these groups are can have a significant impact on your brand’s overall success.

A customer persona is a generalized identity that suits certain groups, but these are not just simple assumptions. Customer personas often rely on concrete data and are designed to help brands market to specific individuals. As brands grow, this becomes more important.

Most brands will start with one or two buyer personas in mind. As a brand gets bigger, they will inevitably find that more people are exposed to their brand. Having clear profiles for customer personas can allow brands to reach their customers in a more personalized way.

Building a Customer Persona

Before your brand can benefit from customer personas, you need to be able to create them. Each customer persona will have a different profile, then these profiles will be used to send out targeted marketing campaigns. Knowing these personas and appealing to them can increase overall audience engagement in a big way. Let’s discuss how to get started:
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     1. Website Trending
Trending is a crucial tool in the world of marketing and it applies here. One great way to start building customer personas is to learn from the data that is available. Your website alone should be able to offer key insights regarding your website visitors. Using this information as a place to start can be extremely helpful.

     2. Use Forms and Profiles
A great way to take this one step further is to gather data as part of a profile. If your customers make a profile on your website, you can use this as a great opportunity to find out more about them. Using general forms and questionnaires, you can get a much stronger read on your customer personas through a profile alone.

By now, the average shopper knows that brands offer individualized marketing based on the data that they have. We expect that brands will know what we keep looking at on a website or what we have tucked away in our baskets for payday—and that is a good thing. It means that more customers are becoming interested in sharing their information in order to receive that personalized experience.

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Simple questionnaires that a person completes while setting up their profile can offer so much about their buyer persona. These fields can tell you when their birthday is, what they love about your brand, or even what their interests are. Every day, services like Ipsy.com use questionnaires to help send their audience products that they will love, and these individualized services are only getting more popular with time.
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     3. Ask for Feedback
Any time that someone interacts with your brand, you should be curious about their experience. Every audience is different, and within those audiences you will find more people who just want something different than the rest. Your goal is to get a common theme, not put every single customer into a simple box. Feedback can help with this by letting customers tell you who they are.

Lifestyle brands are leveraging feedback to create buyer personas in a great way. When they send out products, particularly mixed products like a subscription box, they always ask for feedback on each individual product. This information is used to tailor the experience for each person—and it allows these brands to make a wonderful buyer persona. Over time, this data can be used to meet the needs of individual customers more quickly than ever.
To ask for feedback, you want to tailor the experience, and it can be helpful to offer some kind of incentive. Some brands thrive on feedback requests, but other brands need to bring a bit more to the table. Through emails, pop-ups, and website forms, ask your audience what they want to see. Their answers can help you to meet their needs more effectively.

     4. Learn From Your Team
No one knows better about the interests of a customer than your employees. The individuals who regularly interact with customers will always have a much better gauge on what your customers want. These are the individuals who will hear customers talking and see how certain items never seem to move off the shelves.

Asking your team for feedback can be incredibly beneficial, particularly when there are themes. While some feedback might be specific to one person, in most cases there will be common trends hidden within the information. Using this information can often help you to hear both the best and the worst from different individuals—and that is useful. Knowing what people love and hate about your brand can help you to tailor your approach and adapt your business as needed.
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The Takeaway

Buyer personas are an invaluable tool that every brand should be using. Whether you choose to gather your own data or you partner with a company that has been collecting information for years, you want to use the information that is available. Every customer is different, but some customers are more similar than you think. By exploring these similarities, you can find a way to reach your audience in an exciting new way. Your customers will always appreciate the extra effort—and they will love feeling like you truly know them.

Drew Thomas

Drew Thomas is a graduate of Georgia College & State University, where he earned his Bachelor's Degree in English Literature. He is an expert in brand marketing and has experience in freelance writing on topics ranging from sports to music reviews. He has also spent time as an editor, having revised website copy and press releases for local businesses. In his free time, Drew enjoys performing music, reading, hiking, and spending time with friends.

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