Once you’ve identified the segments your organisation is best suited to meet the needs of, the next step is to create a customer persona.
The goal of a persona is to create someone you can understand and relate to, so you can develop an effective relationship with them.
To create a persona, first, you need to ensure you have data about them in three key areas:
Take some time to adapt the detail in each of these areas according to whether you are marketing B2C (Business to Consumer) or B2B (Business to Business) or B2Gov or Gov2C or Gov2B.
Demographics
These are the basic details that allow you to actually find your ideal client. They typically include detail like:
- Age, Gender, Location
- Status, education
- Job role, job title, job security, job location.
Decide:
- What are the things you really need to know about them that will help you find them?
- How relevant are these details to you understanding and reaching your persona?
- Do you have enough of their demographic information to be able to conduct some research on them?
Psychographics
These are the behaviours, thoughts and attitudes of your Persona. What are their:
- hopes and fears
- ambitions and dreams
- goals and aims
- attitudes to risk
- attitudes to your product or service
- hobbies and interests.
This is a really important section as your key marketing messages will need to appeal to their psychographic elements e.g. helping them allay a fear or achieve a goal.
Communication
What do you know about them that tells you how they like to be communicated with? You might begin with assumptions here but do back it up with research – either your own or finding others’ research about this group.
You need to know:
- Web usage
- Device (desktop, tablet, mobile)
- Offline usage
- Habits and frequency
- Communication preferences including colours, words, tone of voice, images.
What you find out about their communication preferences then becomes the basis of your marketing tactics e.g. if they like to log in to LinkedIn after work at 19.00 then you need to put the right messages for them on LinkedIn after 19.00
Pull it together and create your Persona
It’s often best to represent your Persona on one page. This makes it easy for team members and suppliers to get an overview of the Persona easily and quickly.
Here are some good examples of how to present a Persona but please do adapt this for your organisation.
Remember: your organisation probably has more than one customer group. You’ll need to make the space to create a Persona for each group, so you can communicate effectively with all your clients.
