The Importance of Building Personas for Your Business Personas are crucial to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing budget. Find out how exactly they can help your business and why you should take the time to build them.
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A business persona can be defined as the profile of a product's typical customer. Each business can have multiple personas and they should be at the center of the whole marketing strategy.
Most of the time, the rush to get a product to the market or the assumption that a business knows its own customers leads to expensive mistakes. In the best-case scenario, businesses are still profitable but might be overpaying on conversions for not having a persona built.
Personas are created by actually interviewing your customers. The questions are asked in a way to identify demographics, behaviors, lifestyles, needs, problems in their everyday lives and many more metrics that can then be translated into actionable items from a marketing standpoint.
Let's have a look at just a few things you can do with persona to explain how useful they actually are for a business.
Learn more about your own customers
You can't really know someone until you talk to them. While we might have a lot of data that could be used to target potential customers, we would still be missing a lot of information that data can't provide.
This precious information will help you to really understand how to create the proper communication strategy for your business. Integrating this qualitative data with the quantitative one you collect from traffic on your website will create the perfect marketing mix.
Related: How Consumer Insights Can Turbo Charge Your Brand's Marketing
For instance, if you are selling kitchen appliances your own data might be able to tell that your customers are between the ages of 35-55, like cooking, have kids between the age of 3 and 15 and are early technology adopters. A persona analysis will let you know that they are busy professionals, with a healthy lifestyle and in the market for products that can help them prepare home-cooked meals more efficiently while spending less time in the kitchen. All of the sudden, you now have information that you can use in your marketing messages!
Define your key selling propositions
The content above the fold of a page determines whether a user will keep learning more about your product or service. To clarify, the section above the fold of a page is the one everyone sees before scrolling down.
The content in that section is key to determining the success of your business. The big question is what content you are supposed to place there. Persona analysis includes what users are interested in, what pain points they are trying to find a solution for and what attracts them. You can then use your findings to create above the fold content that really speaks to your potential buyers.
Considering that your business likely has multiple personas, you might actually find out that you need a completely different product or service pages catering to different consumer types. This will consequently lead to higher conversion rates, higher ROAS (return on ad spend) and higher revenue.
Understand the different demographics you are serving
One product or service could be of interest to completely opposite demographics and it should therefore be marketed with different strategies. For instance, a smartphone might be targeting a young crowd because of its high-resolution camera and at the same time, it could also target an older generation because it is a foldable device that reminds them of the old flip phones.
These two audiences clearly have different needs. As a result of that, you might need to market the same feature of the smartphone device differently to the two audiences. For instance, the fact that the phone is foldable can be marketed as "cool" to a young crowd and as a nostalgic element to an older crowd.
Related: How to Increase Your Marketing Return On Investment Through Customization and Multiple Personas
The beauty of personas is that they help you define all of that before hitting the market with a product and maximizing the results of your work.
Identify what type of content you need to create
Content is king, we all know that! However, you need to create good content to be able to sparkle interest in your products or services. Content doesn't refer only to blog articles but includes website pages, ad creatives, print material and much more.
Related: 7 Content Marketing Tips for New Entrepreneurs
If we take the example of a social media ad, a marketing person would need to decide what images, titles and post text to test. One could go based on what he or she thinks would work best and hope for the best or work on personas first and have a better understanding of what might click with the target audience.
This would save a lot of time and money for your business. While testing is going to be needed regardless, personas are going to jumpstart learnings and shorten the time taken to achieve ideal performance
Another important piece of content that will be defined by the persona work is the frequently asked questions. FAQs are a highly underrated section on your website. Potential customers might decide to purchase your product based on what questions you are able to answer on your website. Any doubt left in the consumer will majorly decrease the chance of a sale. You will be able to create highly effective FAQs because personas will include what problems consumers are trying to solve and what features they are looking for in.
In conclusion
Many businesses still avoid studying customer personas because they believe they know their customers but they are actually missing out on an incredible marketing tool that would cut their acquisition costs while maximizing revenue. Ideally, you should perform persona work before getting to market but it is never too late to work on it and tune-up your marketing efforts!
