The What, Why and When of Customer Personas

Personas enable an organization to align around a behavioral view of their customers and identify how a customer perceives value.

Most companies compete today on customer experience whether they want to or not. B2B and B2C enterprises alike have learned (in some cases the hard way) that customer experience is a key differentiator and exceeding customer expectations leads to loyalty, retention, and profit. In fact, Forbes found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are price or product-centric.?

But what makes for a good experience? That really depends on your customer(s) and how they perceive value. Many marketing organizations seek to transform to be more customer-centric organizations. Understanding your most valuable customer personas, their needs, and motivations, how they buy, why they buy is a critical starting point. These customer personas set the stage for how your most important customers perceive value, and give you a depiction of those customers that your organization can align around – a common view and level of understanding of what is important to your customer.

The very term “customer personas” is misunderstood - customer personas are not segments, or demographics, or the job titles of your customers – they are based on behavioral and motivational similarities and differences that can be actioned against in your marketing efforts.

Some questions to consider thinking about: Who are your customer personas? Which
ones are most important to the business? Which ones are expected to grow? What
data do you have to support these personas?
        

What is a Customer Persona?

A persona is a snapshot of a customer that helps us understand how customers define “value”, what are their drivers, motivators, and needs. Personas are typically research-based profiles that describe your ideal customer(s) that are based in segmenting by demographic and psychographic data.

Personas vs. Segments – whats the difference?

A persona is not a segment. A segment is a high-level category of customers, often coming from clustering your database, and based off demographic, firmographic, and purchase behavior. A persona is a character profile based off similar beliefs, attitudes, and values. In essense, personas aim to get at how your customers think so you can deliver a more relevant experience. They cut across segments so you can be more effective in your marketing.

Building customer personas forces a conversation around who are our most important customers and why. Most companies use their data to create multiple customer personas for their business and use them to direct and inform sales, marketing, customer experience, and product development.

Why do we need user personas?

Creating?personas?will help you to understand your users' needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. It will help the team to think like the customer, to recognize the different needs and expectations of different customer personas, and enable the team to develop more customized journeys. Personas are useful tools to help maintain customer-centricity and ensure that your activities across the customer journey are tailored to your customer’s needs. They also highlight unique differences in the ways your customers learn about, consider, buy and use your products or services that will help you improve the customer experience.?

Personas can be as detailed as you need them to be. It’s not really about how much information but the quality of that information.?The value comes from understanding what motivates different types of customers and how you can act on that - how they buy, why they buy, and what may stop them from buying. Personas need to detail the mindset of the customer to be effective. As an organization, you want to understand how your customer defines value – if you understand what is valuable to your customer, you can use that to deliver value to both your customer and your enterprise.

Get started today: Download CMGs Persona Template

Building your Customer Persona

Personas are only as good as the data and insights they are based on, and far too often personas are based on poorly sourced data or no data at all.?Not all organizations have the time or money to invest in expensive research studies to build their customer personas.

Personas should be living documents, updated as more is learned about your target personas. When you start think about it as your minimum viable persona – what’s the minimum information you know today to start marketing to that persona. You can start with what you think you know and test your hypotheses around your customer, you can field quick and easy research, and use what is available to you to build out differentiated customer personas.

Overtime, your personas should be supported by research and data to be effective – the more data supporting them, the more effective your personas will be – and combining qualitative and quantitative insight will make personas even more impactful as they will help you better understand the psychological drivers. Customer interviews can help provide needed insight into the motivations and behaviors of your customers and highlight key differences in needs and buying behavior, your marketing data can provide insight into their journey, customer service calls/ sales calls can inform needs. Organizations have a starting point internally that can be leveraged to inform or enhance personas. Some organizations put surveys on their website for a short period of time to gather quick data on their personas or use social listening as a way to understand customer behavior.

The important part is just to start, work with your analytics team to map out an approach to aggregating and analyzing already existing data to help inform your personas or validate them if you already have a starting point.

Actioning your Personas

Personas are meant to be guideposts for decision-making, not just for marketing, but across the organization. A good persona will help inform product, sales, marketing and customer service strategies and decisions in order to improve the overall customer experience across the customer lifecycle. Within marketing specifically, they can be helpful to inform your entire marketing strategy.

Personas are intended to help keep the customer and their needs in the forefront of communications so that you can deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right customer in a more personalized way. It helps organizations define value for the customer and deliver on that value.

In theory, this seems easy. But putting it into practice is a lot harder because it requires people to change the way they work.

• Organizations are hard-wired to talk about themselves – how great their product or service is, why you should buy it instead of focusing on the customer needs and the information they seek where they seek it. This is further evidenced by an Edelman study that found 56 percent of people believe that marketers spend too much time looking for ways to force them to pay attention to their messages and not enough time thinking of ways to make them want to pay attention. Companies need to be open to flipping the messaging and focus on the needs of the customer.
• In addition, to make personas actionable, you need to be able to match your personas in some way to your prospects and customers in your database so that you can create more custom personalized experiences. 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions—and it’s equally important in the B2B environment on both the acquisition and retention side of the business.
• Furthermore, to truly create and sustain value for your customer requires the whole organization to adopt and use the personas to drive a more customer-centric approach to decision-making. This will also help level set internal conversations. ?

Get started today: Download CMGs Persona Template

Activating a Persona

A Global Healthcare technology leader wanted to be more customer-centric. They were experiencing tons of new market entrants and were experiencing a decline in performance. To compete effectively, they realized they needed to re-center themselves around their customer. This led to an effort to build customer personas that provided insight into their behaviors and motivations. Prior segmentation studies, customer research, and agency insight provided the backbone to inform the dimensions they would use to cluster their customers.

The result was 4 distinct personas that they ran past their research team and marketing team, all who felt they were a great representation that really got into the emotional needs of their customers. The team felt having the personas front and center was critical to making sure the customer voice was always represented in decision-making so persona posters were put up in all conference rooms and they even taped the faces of their personas to the chairs to make sure the human connection to their customers was always present. The team used the personas to modify and personalize campaign landing pages to test more emotional messaging based on persona insights. The result was a tremendous upswing in digital marketing metrics and customer engagement. The team is in the process of working on new content across the customer journey.

Personas are a powerful tool in and of themselves but enable greater effectiveness in your marketing strategy when combined with detailed customer journey maps and value gap maps. These three tools together allow you to paint a picture of how your customer defines value, how they interact with you, what their needs are across the buying journey, and where you have gaps in meeting those needs. Filling these gaps helps improve the overall customer experience and value creation for you and your customers.

CMG works with organizations to help them define and activate their personas so they can increase engagement and deliver on the value their customers seek. Get in touch and download our free personas template. Check back in the coming weeks for more on Customer Journey creation and Value Gap Maps.

Customer Journey Maps - Enables your organization to understand the key questions,
steps taken, and overall complexity of dealing with your organization to provide 
further insight into the needs of your custom

Value Gap Maps - Evaluates your performance and your competitors’ performance
against the needs of your most important customers to identify the areas you excel
and where gaps exist. These gaps enable you to understand how value can be created
for your customers.