Customer Persona for Targeted Marketing
Consumers today are inundated by marketing and advertising—through email, through social media, and in person. Personalized marketing has become a popular way for marketers to break through all the noise and capture customers’ attention. 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a company that offers a personalized experience. Before you can begin integrating personalized marketing, you have to know your customers. Creating a detailed customer persona helps marketers learn more about the audience that should be targeted.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a representation of your ideal customer. It it based on both market research and real data about current customers. Aim to develop a customer persona that is as detailed as possible, including demographics, behavioral patterns, and motivating factors.
Customer personas help marketers target their audiences more effectively, attracting more valuable leads and customers. 52% of consumers are likely to switch from one brand to another if the company doesn’t personalize any of its communications. Personalizing content doesn’t just mean inserting a customer’s name, it encompasses creating relevant content that is engaging and useful to potential customers.
How to Create a Personalized Customer Persona
The first step in developing a customer persona is to define your ideal customer. The more detail you have on your avatar, the better. Look at your current customer database and existing analytics. Google Analytics and social media analytics are great places to start. If you have a base of existing customers, you can ask them for valuable information through surveys or interviews.
Gather demographic information such as location, age, gender, interests, and preferences. Some of the questions a good customer persona should answer are:
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- What are their preferred sources for news?
- Which social media platforms do they use?
- What are their interests and values?
- What are their pain points or challenges?
Create a detailed profile of a single customer that represents your target audience.
Using the Customer Persona
Customer personas are not just a tool for retailers and e-commerce companies. Companies across varied industries and with any product or service can benefit from developing a customer persona. The most successful retailers leverage personalization and data very effectively.
Start by identifying which types of content and which marketing channels will have the biggest ROI. Find the typical paths that customers take to reach the purchase stage and look for pain points that may be barriers to making a purchase. Mapping out the purchase path will help the marketers pinpoint the gaps in content and make adjustments to keep potential customers moving through the funnel to conversion.
Targeted Video Messaging
79% of consumers would rather view a video about a product than read about it. Learning what content performs best with the ideal customers can help shape the style of video and tailor the messaging it contains. For example, if your audience is senior business professionals, a more formal tone is most appropriate. There are many different styles of video that you can create, tailored specifically to your target audience.
Video marketers acquire 66% more qualified leads per year, and pairing video with a well-developed customer persona can lead to an increase in purchases. Send video messaging in marketing emails to boost response rates with potential customers.
Developing a customer persona involves research into your target audience and distilling that information into an ideal customer that represents your larger base. An effective customer persona helps guide marketing strategy to use targeted messaging. Executing marketing strategy will help reveal which channels and content is most effective in driving awareness and generating leads. Marketers can use customer personas to help shape their content strategy for the ideal customer audience customer persona with targeted messaging and video marketing. Once you have a customer persona created, let us help you create great videos!
What do you think your customer persona will look like?
