Customer Persona Types and Approach

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).

What is a Customer Persona?

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.

3 Types of Personas in Marketing

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.

1. Buyer Personas

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.

2. Website Personas

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.).

3. User Personas

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.

Quantitative vs. Qualitative Research: What’s Best to Create Customer Personas?

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.

How to Create Qualitative Personas?

Here’s how you can develop qualitative personas:

1. Conduct Qualitative Research

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.

2. Segment Users

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.

3. Create a Persona for Each Segment

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.

Benefits of Qualitative Personas

The following are the key benefits of using qualitative personas:

• You need comparatively less effort and costs, as long as you can find users to interview.
• As you create personas based on interviews, chances are your personas will be defined by just one or two attributes. This makes them comparatively easier to understand.
• You need fewer specialized skill sets to find patterns and create personas out of interview findings. There’s no need for statistical analysis skills.

Drawbacks of Qualitative Personas

On the downside:

• There’s a risk of being wrong as your findings are based on small sample size.
• When interviewing users, you inevitably bring your existing assumptions to the research. So, instead of discovering something new, you may simply end up validating your existing opinion.

When Should You Use Qualitative Approach?

Go for a qualitative approach when:

• You are short on time and funds to build personas.
• Your stakeholders don’t need quantitative data to believe and use your personas.
• You are experimenting with using personas on a smaller venture to see how they work before applying them to the larger business.

How to Create Quantitative Personas?

Follow these steps to create quantitative personas:

1. Conduct Qualitative Research

This approach helps to reveal insights into user objectives, behaviors, and attitudes.

2. Establish Hypotheses About Segmentation Options

Use qualitative research to come up with several possible ways for user segmentation. You want a variety of candidates to analyze.

3. Collect Data on Segmentation Options via Quantitative Research

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.

4. Segment Users Based on Statistical Cluster Analysis

Use statistical algorithms to guide you to a segmentation model instead of just testing your present assumptions.

5. Create a Persona for Each Segment

Gather the data from cluster analysis and make it realistic by adding names, photos, and stories.

Benefits of Quantitative Persona

The benefits of this approach include:

• There’s less human bias involved, which may dispel any doubts. Shareholders might have about personas as a valid decision-making tool.
• It helps you identify one segmentation model that you can best use to create personas.
• You can examine more variables using statistical cluster analysis that isn’t visible to the human eye.

Drawbacks of Quantitative Persona

The drawbacks of this approach include:

• It needs significant effort as statistical analysis takes time and is iterative.
• There’s a need for more specialized skill sets to apply various statistical data analysis techniques.
• The results can lead to more complicated or uncomfortable ideas beyond the expectations of your business stakeholders.

When Should You Use Quantitative Approach?

Use this approach if:

• You have time and money to invest.
• Your stakeholders want quantitative data to believe and use your personas.
• You wish to analyze several segmentation models to find the right one.
• Numerous variables drive your personas, but you do not know which ones are most critical.

Factors Affecting Customer Persona Marketing

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:

• Background – It can include demographics like age and gender.
• Goals – It covers both the short and long-term goals of your buyer group.
• Values – Understanding what is significant for your consumers in terms of values is vital to talk to them in a way they want to hear.
• Challenges – It includes all the problems your customers face in their daily lives. Use this knowledge to match up your product/service and voice to the particular wants and issues of your buyers.

Tips to Conduct Market Research

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:

• Concentrate on market research to make well-informed business decisions.
• Determine what you should know and whether you need deep insight into the situation or a superficial glimpse.
• Determine how quickly and accurately you need the info.
• Begin researching with a clear brief that includes goals, deadlines, and any other background info.
• Determine whether you can conduct research in-house or need to engage an external resource.
• Leverage easily accessible info from internal records, staff and consumer feedback, publications, and the internet.
• Ask consumers who they see as your competition, and why they prefer your brand.
• Conduct surveys, focus groups, and observation studies to support decisions if needed.
• Study research outcomes meticulously and objectively.
• Be ready to conduct further research in case you have insufficient or outdated information.
• Utilize your findings to make decisions and plan brand strategies.
• Regularly update your understanding of buyers and market situation.

How to Create A Customer Persona?

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:

Personal Demographics

• Are your customers married?
• What’s their annual household income?
• Where do they live?
• What is their gender?
• How old are they?
• Do they have children?

Educational Background

• What level of education did they complete?
• Which schools did they attend?
• What courses did they study?

Career Path

• How did they end up where they are today?
• Did they major in a subject that’s very similar to or very different from their current role?
• Has their career track been pretty traditional?
• Did they switch from another industry?

Responsibilities and Everyday Activities

• What is a typical day in your customer’s life?
• What tasks comprise an ordinary workday for them?
• How do they measure the success of their work?
• What skills do they need to perform their job?

Media Consumption Habits

• How much time does your ideal customer spend on social media?
• Where do they get their news?
• What type of content do they consume daily – videos, articles, or social media posts?
• What is their favorite social media platform?
• Which publications or blogs do they follow?

Purchase Factors and Decisions

• What factors encourage your buyers into making a purchase -bargains, limited-time offers, or convenience?
• Which product factors grab their attention – features, benefits, or price?
• What did they purchase recently, and why?
• What was their evaluation process?
• How did you decide to purchase that product or service?

Objectives and Motivations

• What are your customers’ professional objectives?
• What are their objectives?

Values and Principles

• What values and principles do they have?
• What are the characteristics of their personalities?

Professional Life

• In which industry /company do they work?
• What is the size of their company (revenue/employees)?
• What is their job role and title?
• How long have they had this role and title?
• Are they an individual contributor, or do they manage other people?

Pain Points and Challenges

• What factors prevent them from doing their job successfully?
• What problems do they frequently encounter at work, at school, or in their personal lives?

Reasons Why Customer Personas Are Underutilized in Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

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.

Developing your PPC Campaign Around a Customer Persona

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:

• Create a template that mentions what you’re seeking in your customers in terms of behavior, demographics, interests, etc.
• Choose your target location in accordance.
• Choose device targeting, identifying which device your customers are more likely to use to see your ad.
• Consider creating and targeting separate campaigns for different age groups.
• Choose and define the audience appropriately.
• You may create your audience with remarketing by leveraging your loyal customers as you already know their persona.

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.

Using Google Analytics to Improve Customer Personas in PPC

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:

Monitor audience performance

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.

Get a snapshot of PPC campaigns

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.

Understand various customer touchpoints

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.

Combine query data with other attributes

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.

Wrap Up

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.