How do you leverage customer personas to create engaging and relevant content and messages?

I wouldn't use the term customer segments as it will too easily get people into a marketing mindset or cause people to just bring over the marketing segmentation for use in customer experience (CX). This would be a huge mistake. Start with customer research to identify the naturally occurring groups of people with similar interests, behaviors, wants, and needs. Don't have so many personas that some are too similar but don't limit the number so much that you under-tailor the experiences you provide. Different personas ultimately have (and should have) different experiences.

Personas are easy to get wrong. Focusing too much of the valuable real estate for a persona on made up demographics is one place where people go wrong. Focus instead on goals, motivations, behaviors, beliefs and values. Items from this list that help you better understand how one persona differs from another and that make it easier for people to step into the shoes of this persona.

Personas’ focus on the individual misses the opportunities in considering people as social creatures. Customers belong to communities and are part of influence networks like friends, family, co-workers, etc. that they use to decide what to watch, read, buy, and pay attention to. We can understand customers’ context better if we understand the complexity of their social network. We can ask questions like how the communities a customer belongs are structured; what is their dynamics; how the influence spreads within them; who are the most active and/or valuable members, etc.

Reminder - customer persona creation should start with customer research. Because personas are a personification of multiple people, there will always be something that any individual customer of that persona type will disagree with but it is good to make sure you're in the ballpark with a lot of resonance. Stakeholder validation is definitely important as you're either creating personas for a client and/or to inform the work of other parts of the business.

Before speaking about messages, I think it is much more important to validate that you have the right touchpoints to facilitate the customer journey that each persona wants to have. This may be different from the journey they are currently forced to take. Gaps you identify will definitely influence the content creation and/or changes that you make to match their wants/needs/goals/behaviors/intents.

Customer personas can be an incredibly powerful tool for helping to bring the voice of the customer (VOC) inside the organization and to help a broad range of employees better put themselves in the shoes of the customer as they do their jobs and seek to be both customer-centric but also to elevate the customer experience (CX). Personas can also be a powerful tool to help onboard new employees as well - IF your personas are more than demographics and instead provide insight into the wants, needs, challenges, behaviors, etc. that customers have. More on this in my latest article for the HCLTech blog here: https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bringing-customer-experience-to-life

It’s crucial to ensure that personas are based on diverse research and inclusivity to avoid perpetuating harmful assumptions or discrimination. If not carefully crafted there’s a real risk of reinforcing stereotypes and biases that marginalize people who could be potential customers.

Remember that your customer personas are based on your customer research, motivations, behaviors and buying habits that align with your existing customers to engage better on their customer journey. This is different from your ideal customer. An ideal customer is one who you think or would like to target for purchasing your product. You need customer journeys for an ideal customer and customer personas however they will have different messaging based on the components that make up the personas vs your ideal customer.

It is important to remember that as organizations grow, personas and journey maps may be the only interaction many employees may have with the voice of the customer (VOC) as captured by the CX team. Smart customer experience professionals will also try and regularly disseminate customer research as well to help reinforce customer-centric culture activities and experience improvement. For more on how to build better personas, check out my latest article for the HCLTech blog here: https://www.hcltech.com/blogs/bringing-customer-experience-to-life