One way of generating more sales as a business is identifying the needs of a particular set of people and providing solutions to the problems. To effectively identify these problems to provide solutions, you need to consider some factors, and these factors are known as customer personas.
Understanding your buyer persona(s) is a very important factor for driving content creation, email marketing, follow up messages, brand marketing contents, product development and other business-related concepts that help customer acquisition and retention.
What are customer personas?
Customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics. It allows you as a business owner to better understand the different internal segments within your wide range of target audiences.
The following tips give you a picture of how to layout the key elements of the customer persona while considering certain information such as similar brands of interest, location, and the kind of communication they prefer.
- Survey your existing customers
Customer surveys are one of the best forms of creating a buyer persona. If you have existing customers, carry out an online survey and get to know them better. Customer satisfaction surveys are only effective when you ask the right questions, in the best way and at the perfect time. Taking your time to create surveys is one of the few methods you can use to distinguish yourself in the competitive marketplace.
Note the following when carrying out online surveys:
- Keep the questions short as you would not want them to lose interest in the entire process.
- Only ask questions that fulfil the goal of the survey
- Construct smart, open-ended questions
- Ask one question at a time
- Create consistent rating scales
- Avoid leading and loading questions
- Identify customer pain points
This is the most important aspect when it comes to creating your customer personas. In this stage, you ask questions like; what problems are your potential customers trying to solve? What’s holding them back from success? What barriers do they face in reaching their goals? Another way of doing this is using your social media pages for more content interactions. By setting up search streams online to monitor mentions of your brand, customer’s issues with your competitors and a lot of factors, you can monitor what people are saying about your brand.
- Conduct online research
Online research in this case will mean identifying your customers’ pain points and creating a picture of how your products and services can help them. In this case, consider asking the following questions:
- How can we help? This is the type of products or services your business offers and how it can help ease the pain of potential customers.
- What are your audience’s main purchasing barriers? Look out for these issues through your online surveys and identify how you can make your buying process more seamless.
- Where are your followers in their buying journey? In this case, you consider your existing sales funnel and its effectiveness. It is through the sales funnel you can identify what stage of the buying process your buyers are in.
- Analyze your data
The above steps can only work when you identify your data and take steps to work on them. In this stage, you gather all of your data and look for a common factor(s) between all groups. As you draw a centre point, you will be able to create the basis of your customer personas. It simply involves taking all of these characteristics and turning them into a persona you can identify with.
- Share results with your company
If you run a small business or a company, it is important to share the results of your analysis with your team. If your company has a customer service team, it is a good idea to check in with your customer service team and also the sales team with the results of your survey. As a team, these results will guide all activities towards creating business content for the right group of audience.
Getting your customer personas right is the best way to make more sales as a business. In all of your decisions; social media content, email marketing and your overall marketing strategy, you should always think about your buyer personas.
