Building Customer Personas to create a better Customer Experience

Customer personas at first glance may seem complicated. However, they are simply a fictional, generalized representation of your customer. They help you understand your clients or prospects better. They represent your core audience or in other words, who needs your product or service the most?

For most small businesses, one or two customer personas are a good starting point. These would represent your core audience and maybe one secondary audience.

As you grow, or if you have a broad service offering, you create a persona for a new business line. Each persona will help you define what is important to each group of customers you serve.

But keeping it simple with 1–2 core personas, also helps businesses stay focused on their core. All too often businesses try to do too much. By trying to reach everybody they spread their resources too thin. This means they don’t make the impact they aimed to create.

So how do you get started? The strongest customer personas are based on market research and insights. You can gather this information via surveys and interviews. While many focus these surveys and research on demographics (age, income, education level), we would recommend focusing on psychographics ( interests, hobbies, goals). By focusing on the latter, you can move beyond the transactional nature of the business to a more emotional connection.

How do you create customer personas?

Personas are best if they are created through surveys, research, and interviews. You can include a mix of prospects, clients, and those outside of your contact list who might align with your target audience if available. This will ensure you are not introducing bias. If you only speak to your current customers you may miss an insight that is important.

Here are some practical ways to gather information to develop your Customer personas:

• Interview clients — Don’t worry if you are working virtually, this can be done, over the phone, or video call to discover what they like about your services. You are going to want to learn about their challenges and also how your products and services have helped them overcome those challenges. You can ask what made them buy your product. what does their day look like? How does your product or service fit into their day
• Survey — You can have them fill out a pre-interview survey to capture psychographics. What activities do they like? What do they read? where do they shop? What are their hobbies? You will customize based on your product or service, but the goal is to learn more about your customers. This can help you understand where they may learn about products like yours. Or how the product or service integrates into their life.
• Pro Tip: Utilize form fields in your CRM that capture important persona information. This can help you send more targeted information to each persona. Let’s be real we all get too many emails. The more your emails share relevant information the more they will be read
• Work with sales. Either ask them which types of leads they interact with the most. Which ones wind up being the best fit for your brand? Which ones don’t typically find value in your offering?
• Pro-tip: Don’t forget to ask what other products or services they may like to see you offer. It may help you uncover an unmet need of your current customers. If customers want something they will ask their salesperson, so this is a great way to get that feedback. Same thing with the Customer Support team!

How can you use personas?

Personas allow you to personalize or target your sales and marketing efforts for different audience segments. Instead of sending the same email to your full email list, you can segment by customer persona. This enables you to tailor your messaging for each persona, identifying what is most important to them.

For example, say you own a mechanical repair shop. If one group of customers, owns a diesel truck, why waste their time with an update about how to prepare a small sedan for a road trip?

Customer personas allow you to create targeted content for your specific clientele. This helps them learn about products or services that are best suited to their needs. By sending relevant information to your customers, they will engage more and stay in touch. People engage when you help them solve their challenges.

What are negative personas?

Where a customer persona represents your ideal client, a negative customer persona represents who may not be a good fit for your company.

Take these personas for example:

● People who may not need your product or service. Knowing this lets you be confident in targeting your marketing resources.

● People or businesses who are only engaging with your content for research/knowledge but not looking to make a purchase.

● Potential clients who are too large and may not need your product. Or companies that are too small and may not be able to afford your service or need it just yet.

Pro-tip: By taking the time to create negative customer personas you will be at a substantial advantage. It will allow you to segment out the customers that are not a good fit for your products from the rest of your contacts. This can help you achieve a lower cost-per-client and cost-per-lead and see higher sales productivity. Most importantly, it helps you build customer loyalty as you are focused on your core customer. You are serving them with the highest value products and services, and investing resources in their success.

In summary

One of the critical things to ensure your marketing is on point is to utilize customer personas. As the saying goes, being specific is terrific, and developing a good customer persona is no different.

Visit us at TEAMES & CO for more information on creating an exceptional customer experience, or at our download page to purchase our Persona Worksheet Template.