How do you cater to different customer personas?

Warning: you might not like this. Most personas are crap. (yep i said it) In my 20 years in product marketing for b2b tech, two mistakes stand out. Heed these signs, or your personas are gonna be like all that crap. Your marketing & sales performance will thank you! 1) The wrong focus "Enterprise Ella's" 2.4 kids and advanced degree don't frickin' matter. What does? Her role. Her challenges. Her cares. Her needs. Her goals. Her feelings. Her words. And all must be REAL. 2) Lack of updates Repeat after me. Personas are not a one-and-done. Personas are not an update-once-a-year thing. ALWAYS listen, observe, and engage with your target audience. Then make updates as you learn new things. I hope this helps. #BOOMshockalocka ????????

Stop concentrating on the demographics! Segment via their problems, opportunities, pain points and needs. Marketers spend too much time breaking down "normal" demographics instead of focusing on the segment's personality.

Knowing who your customers are and what they want is key to any business strategy. Customer personas matter because they can provide insight into your specific target audience. You need to have indication into your customer personas so you can develop strategies to meet their requirements, making it more personalised as opposed to generic. You also need to be adaptable and flexible in your approach to cater for multiple personas.

Start with understanding the individual and unique needs of each one. Only when you understand what tickles each one should you begin crafting the "how's", the "what's" and even the "why not's" of your next steps. Bottom line, never be the proverbial extortionist who prided himself as the world's best sales person when he was able to sell ice to an Eskimo.

Typically, there are three main personas to consider for the different types of people engaging with your business. Buyer persona: represents your ideal target customer to purchase your product or service. Because they have the highest relation to your revenue, they play a significant role in your marketing strategies, and sales funnel. User persona: represents the users or the customers using your product or service. You use these personas to guide product features and design. Website persona: represents all the visitors your website is intended to serve. They help guide design and include present customers, clients, investors, leads, and partners. These three types of customer personas will allow you to visualize a solid marketing funnel.

Too often people build their ideal client personas and criteria based upon their top existing clients in the their CRM. In many cases that top 20% of your CRM / client base is not even close to the top 20% in the marketplace you're focused on. Yes do your research but spend more time on the ideal client criteria and personas in the marketplace... not your CRM. This may mean that you will need to pivot your value proposition, prospecting approach and even your solution to truly capitalize on the top 20% that will drive 80% of your revenues.

Put a face on the persona. When we do personas, we make sure that each persona has it's own "identification card". Yes, there's some basic demographics. But the focus is always the same: - What are their painpoints? - What are their opportunities for grow using your solutions? - Etc.

Marketing Professionals often adopt the approach which is fixed in many ways like use Demographics, Psychographics, focus groups, CRM data, surveys, social media data etc. all of which is quite relevant. One basic thing that I have found to be extremely important and important but is often ignored, is the objective for which the persona is being created. The fact the individuality is on the rise there is no one size fits all classification. The classification does change with marketing objectives for which it was created in the first place. Marketeers would do well to keep end objectives in mind as the days of having fixed customer personas are long over, though it may still be around in the broader sense of the word.

If you want to create a comprehensive customer or buyer persona then look to combine insights from various data sources. The key sources you can use are: 1. Customer research—Collecting data through surveys, focus groups, interviews, and observation. 2. Direct customer feedback—online reviews, customer service interactions 3. Government data sources—Accessing publicly available data from agencies like Census Bureau or Bureau of Labor Statistics. 4. Industry research—Collecting data through market research reports like Gartner or Forrester. 5. Social media—Tracking social media conversations, interactions, and trends 6. Analytics software—Collecting and analyzing data from website traffic, social media engagement, and email campaigns.

My strategy is to find social media platforms where my potential audience hangs out. I look for topics that relate to the problems the product solves and read what people are talking about. Surveys are cool too, but you gotta be ready for them. I've seen surveys with questions that seem more interested in getting answers that suit their business rather than really knowing what I think.

You know you have a good client persona when it feels like the person it describes is in the meeting with you. A good client persona represents the user’s job, goals, challenges and personality in depth. We give each persona a name and make the description available to everyone on all the teams. People refer to the roles by name as we discuss functionality, user experience and product value. I love listening in on a conversation where the persona is referred to as real and people are discussing how that person would respond to functionality.

LOL! If you have successfully dipped your toes into brand awareness campaigns, here's a handy tip on leveraging customer personas: Paid Advertising (Quickly get the hang of it if you're new.) Content Marketing (Ramp up your skills more.) Social Media Marketing (Don't dawdle if YOU ARE NEW – this one's crucial!) Email Marketing (A golden chance you don't want to miss!)

One of the best ways to use customer personas is campaign personalization. Digitally and on your overall strategy, you'll have better success and pay less for higher quality customers because everything from your messaging to your creative is tailored to your personas pain points.

Keep a close eye on the performance of your campaigns for each persona. Use data and analytics to validate your personas and of course, tweak them.

LinkedIn's got you covered on this one in their article! But, based on what I've learned, try dividing your persona groups by their different mindsets, and then run A/B tests for each of those segments.

If your personas are in a PDF or a slide deck, they're already stale. A great practice is to put them in a "messaging system" that your whole team (not just marketing) can contribute and update. Let your field team update it with what they're hearing and regularly validate against a first-principles set of messages.

Get to know Market Automation tools. Once you're good at it, you can set up automatic updates for your customer profiles. Remember, the better your research, the better strategies you can set up in these tools. Let me repeat: get to know Market Automation tools.

But the most important tip is to : Talk to your sales team Your sales team is the one that has long conversations with your target audience. They would know about the pain points and motivations of your prospects more than anyone else. Ask them about the kind of generalizations that they can make about the different types of customers they talk to.

Here are 4 ways you can create personas for your brand: - Segment by existing customers: If you have a CRM, you can gather a lot of data from there as to how which personas to create. - Segment by digital analytics: If you have existing content such as blog posts, website pages, and other pieces of content can give you leading indicators as to what you're audience finds interesting and which can give you clues as to which personas to create. - Segment by Product or Service: You can take an existing product or service you offer and work backwards to find personas that may have pain points you can offer a solution to. - Segment Through Lookalike Brands/Competitors: Lookalike brands and competitors may have personas you haven't reached yet