The What, Why and When of Customer Personas
CMG Consulting
We are a strategic consulting firm that partners with you to amplify your road to revenue.
In today’s competitive market with new companies arising every day, customer experience is a key differentiator, and exceeding customer expectations leads to loyalty, retention, and profit.
However, thinking your company understands customer experience and being customer-centric are starkly different.
Customer-centricity allows your team to make decisions based on how your customer is thinking, feeling, and reacting, rather than just what they are seeing on their customer journey. In fact, Forbes found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than those that are price or product-centric.
The key to understanding your customer needs, motivations, how they buy, and why they buy is well-developed, researched customer 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 need? What do they value? These are just a few of the questions that you may ask yourself when building customer personas.
Personas are typically research-based profiles that describe your ideal customer(s) that are based in segmenting by demographic and psychographic data. Sometimes, 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.?
When leveraged effectively, a customer persona profile will 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.
Why use customer personas?
Building customer personas forces a conversation around who your most important customers are and why. Most companies create?multiple?customer personas to direct and inform sales, marketing, customer experience, and product development.
They help the team to think like the customer and enable us 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.
Get started today: Download CMGs?Persona Template
Building your Customer Persona
Personas can be as detailed (or not) as you need them to be. It’s not 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. Because personas are intended to be living documents, updated as you learn more about your customer.
Consider what you need for a minimum viable persona. You may not have access to droves of customer data. You may have too much data in front of you to sort out how your customers perceive value. In these cases, you can start with what you think you know and test your hypotheses around your customer, fielding quick and easy research, to build out differentiated customer personas.
Over time,?your personas should be supported by research and data?to be effective. The more data supporting them, the more effective your personas will be.
Some strategies to begin to deepen your understanding of your customer’s experience early include:
Most importantly, just start! Work with your analytics team to map out an approach to aggregating and analyzing already existing data to help inform your personas.
Actioning your Personas
Personas are meant to be guideposts for decision-making across the organization. A good persona will help inform product, sales, marketing, and customer service strategies to improve the overall customer experience across the customer lifecycle, ultimately allowing your team and customer to thrive.
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.
And while putting it into practice requires people to change the way they work, it is well worth the effort.?
Activating a Persona - A Global Healthcare Case Study
A Global Healthcare technology leader wanted to improve customer centricity. They were experiencing new market entrants and 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.
They worked with the analytics team investigating pre-existing data resulting in 4 distinct personas that became critical to making sure the customer voice was always represented in decision-making. 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.
Seeing a tremendous upswing in digital marketing metrics and customer engagement, the team is now in the process of working on new content across the customer journey that is more informed.
Personas are a powerful tool that enables 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.
Interested to learn more? Get in touch and?download?our free personas template.
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