Strategy

Customer personas

Knowing who your audience is and what they want is vital in satisfying their needs and drive engagement. Irrespective of industry or business size, having customer personas for the different products or services you offer is imperative in targeting your audience in a wide variety of marketing materials, such as websites, content writing and social media. Knowing who your customers are also helps you to make the most out of your business which is imperative for future growth.

WHAT ARE CUSTOMER PERSONAS?

Creating a customer persona is a method of segmenting your target audience. They are profiles based on the analysis and research of your real customers, which help to build a more detailed picture of your audience. They are built up of both ‘facts’ from your real customers such as age range and location, however this data is combined with emotive information such as personal motivations, what they value in a brand, what kind of communication they prefer to create hypothetical audiences which segment your existing customers. This insight can then be used to deliver a more relevant experience.

HOW DO EDGE BUILD CUSTOMER PERSONAS?

If you have a wide audience demographic, you can create personas for the different products or services you offer. Building these personas means that you can be sure to target the right person from day one, meaning your business no longer wastes money targeting people on the off chance they slightly fit your audience. It saves on costs while acquiring higher quality conversions. Regardless of your industry, we can create tailored customer personas. Our experts use a variety of tools to determine the who, what, when, where and why of your persona targeting strategy. Personas involve a great deal of time and research, but they help ensure that your market strategies will be effective and make the greatest impact on sales.

Our 20 years’ experience in customer personas make us experts at what we do. Below, we’ve listed the four steps to creating effective customer personas.

Our four steps to creating effective customer personas

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STEP ONE: RESEARCHING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

The first step is to do a little research. Researching your audience will help to create a realistic persona, and possibly find interesting details about your customers that you didn’t know before. This can be effectively carried out by viewing buying records and sending out questionnaires and surveys to your existing contact lists. The more research you do, the better you will be able to reach potential clients in a way that will resonate with them.

We will work with you to assess your current customer base. Who are your best customers? Are there any similarities between them?
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STEP TWO: NARROW DOWN THE COMMON DETAILS

With your data gathered and the information sorted, narrow down your results by finding the most common answers you received from customers. Then, weeding through your research to determine the most important details will affect how you communicate with your audience. For example, if most of your target audience share the same challenges, this will be an important detail to include in your persona.

This will be narrowed down on demographics, behaviours, challenges and interests and email preferences.
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STEP THREE: CREATE SEPARATE PERSONAS

Next, you should organise those details into separate personas. Identifying people in your audience with the same challenges and goals and group them into their own category.
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STEP FOUR: PERSONALISE

All your marketing efforts can now be personalised to the personas you have created.