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Persona-based marketing is one of the tenets in digital marketing. Customer personas representing your prospects and consumers are widely-used in advertising, sales, web and software design, and in communicating with shareholders.
It is a substantial competitive advantage when you know how to satisfy your target audience’s needs and interests, as you’ll be better placed to deliver the solutions they need.
Therefore, a persona-based marketing approach helps improve customer experience, enhance targeting accuracy, and leverage behavioral analytics to meet your business objectives. But what is a customer persona?
In this guide, you’ll learn the answer to that question. You’ll also discover how customer personas can help make your remarketing campaigns more effective, stimulating your conversion growth, increasing retention, and reducing customer-acquisition-cost (CAC) and cost-per-lead (CPL).
A customer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of your ideal buyer based on market research and actual data about your present consumers. It encompasses consumer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and objectives.
With customer personas, you can understand different sets or groups of consumers. You get to know where a particular group lives, their age bracket, and maybe some of their usual purchasing behavior. All this information can help you develop a better understanding of these homogenous groups, so you can better serve their interests.
A lot of marketers make the mistake of creating a single customer persona. However, there are usually several different customer types within the same audience, with slightly varied interests. Therefore, you have to develop at least three main kinds of personas for your visitors that consider the different types of people engaging with your business.
A buyer persona represents your target customer, who is involved in buying your product or service. Your target customer has the most obvious relation to your revenue. So, they play a highly significant role in navigating your marketing strategies and communications.
Your website persona depicts all the people who your website is intended to serve. They help guide your website design and include critical audiences that buyer personas don’t cover (such as present consumers, consumers’ clients, investors, prospective workers, the media, etc.).
User personas represent the people who will be using your product or service, irrespective of whether they have any impact over the buying decision. You might use these personas to guide product design, as well as communications about product advantages.
The first step to understanding your customers is to research them either qualitatively or quantitatively.
Qualitative research allows you to discover new insights using a small sample size. Common examples include user interviews and usability testing. While it is easier to perform, qualitative research is not much beneficial because it involves a limited number of people.
Quantitative Research allows you to test or prove a hypothesis that you uncover with qualitative research. However, it uses a large sample size, such as surveys and site traffic analysis. You can observe statistically significant trends and have more assurance that your findings precisely reflect reality for all users.
Here’s how you can develop qualitative personas:
The most common type of qualitative research is a user interview. It allows you to talk one-on-one to more than ten users easily. Alternatively, you can conduct field studies to observe users in their native environment (such as their workplace or house). Another less commonly used approach for generating personas is usability testing to observe user behavior.
The next step is to segment users based on their goals, attitudes, or behaviors. For instance, for a real estate website, you may interview customers and segment them based on overall objectives like buying or selling a house, finding an apartment, refinancing a mortgage, etc.
As you include more details about the objectives, behaviors, and attitudes, every user type evolves into a persona that comes close to reality when you associate it with a name, a photo, demographic info, and more.
The following are the key benefits of using qualitative personas:
On the downside:
Go for a qualitative approach when:
Follow these steps to create quantitative personas:
This approach helps to reveal insights into user objectives, behaviors, and attitudes.
Use qualitative research to come up with several possible ways for user segmentation. You want a variety of candidates to analyze.
Ask particular questions for each potential segmentation option. For instance, during a site survey analysis, you may ask how long and how often the candidates use the website. The purpose is to gather more data for the next step.
Use statistical algorithms to guide you to a segmentation model instead of just testing your present assumptions.
Gather the data from cluster analysis and make it realistic by adding names, photos, and stories.
The benefits of this approach include:
The drawbacks of this approach include:
Use this approach if:
Customer persona marketing is based on human psychology. You study factors such as age, gender, and social status to understand why customers behave the way they do.
Customer personas emerge from real people. Rather than relying on numbers on a specific demographic, you can observe patterns of real-life buyers to establish these personas. As a result, it’s easier to produce content based on the requirements and desires of real consumers.
Below are a few factors that affect customer personas:
Want to maximize your sales and stand out from the competition? It’s essential to know your market and the trends in your industry.
Keep these in mind to better understand your target market:
Customer personas are an essential element of modern business, especially for the sales and marketing departments.
But how do you create a customer persona? Consider answering the following questions:
Customer personas help you understand and construct a relationship method within your sales and marketing funnel so that you do not rely excessively on a search to make it work.
Often, marketers create customer personas that do not provide adequate information about an audience. As a result, they end up wasting advertising spend.
Creating customer personas is often viewed as an unnecessary expense. Many advertisers think, “OK, I’ve got some clicks, but nobody downloaded my whitepaper. This means everything was a waste.”
All that knowledge about who clicked and came to your website goes unused and wasted. To save the day, you need to view your spending as buying knowledge about personas that you can reuse.
To make your PPC campaigns a success, you must understand who your target customers are. After all, successful PPC advertising focuses on every individual customer and their interests.
When you start creating your customer personas, you start the process of audience segmentation for your ads. It’s just not feasible to begin creating a PPC campaign without creating your buyer personas first.
Investing serious efforts into brainstorming and planning your PPC campaigns will pay off eventually once you run your campaigns. Creating a buyer persona document is just one piece of that puzzle. So, consider the amount of mileage you can get out of a well-crafted customer persona document.
Here’s how you can generate your buyer persona document:
When it comes to building your buyer persona, you may want to focus on combined audiences. It’s a great targeting option that lets you combine several audience attributes, like in-depth demographics and affinities. You can use this info to build “personas” that depict your target audience segments.
Combined audiences also allow you to intersect audience segments, expressing most advertiser personas. For instance, suppose you’re creating an ad to target outdoor enthusiasts (affinity audience) or customers wanting to purchase an automobile (in-market audience). Using combined audiences allows you to intersect the affinity audience with the in-market audience while targeting your SUV ad to outdoor enthusiasts who are also planning to purchase an automobile.
When you don’t use combined audiences, your ad will be shown to customers who like the outdoors but are not in-market for an automobile or else buyers who are in-market for an automobile but aren’t outdoor enthusiasts.
Integrating Google Analytics into your PPC advertising can help you get the insights you need to improve your ad performance. Leveraging data will enable you to better analyze your campaigns beyond impressions, clicks, and conversions. You can generate your own report to analyze your data.
Google Analytics can help you gather data from your PPC campaigns to create a strong customer persona. It can help you improve personas in the following ways:
Audience reports show how a specific audience segment has performed as part of a PPC campaign. Reports on combined audiences show you impressions and views for that audience so that you can evaluate its performance.
Custom reports all the info you need to get the bigger picture of your PPC campaign. These reports include information such as the percentage of new visits and revenue per click.
Plus, they tie all this info into Google Analytics goals and e-commerce tracking. You can make the most use of these reports to create more personalized customer personas.
Google Analytics reports depict how various marketing channels contribute to the conversion path, including data from paid search. Plus, it also includes organic, email, direct visits, and more.
Using this data for your paid search ads, you can see how customers are interacting with your brand. This will help you make the customer targeting more personal based on their behavior.
You can combine query data with behavior, conversions, social, and more. If you want to examine user behavior and how they interact with your site, you may analyze the bounce rate, pages they browse per visit, and average visit duration.
All this will help you understand the level of user engagement with your content, making it easier for you to create buyer personas that can increase customer engagement with your brand.
Whether you are a product manager, UX designer, or marketer, customer personas can help you develop a more in-depth insight into your consumer’s needs and problems, ways to solve their problems, and features, campaigns, and initiatives that you should prioritize.
Keep in mind that your buyer personas are only as good as the data-driven research that goes into them. You should base them on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data gathered from several sources, not just from your team’s viewpoints and assumptions.
Your ROI will vary by offer and customer persona, so leverage data from Google Analytics to make the right decisions for your business.
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