Customers are the entire reason you are in business. Without your customers, you don’t have much of a business. This is why you need to understand exactly what your customers want and need. The ideal way to do this is to develop a customer persona. Not only that, but you need to develop one that will enhance customer success. The more successful your customers are at achieving their goals, the more loyal they will be to your business. 

What Is a Customer Persona? 

A customer persona is an artificial person you create that embodies your target customer. By creating a customer persona, you learn about what their interests and behaviors are. The information you get from a customer persona assists you in being more efficient and accurate in your marketing efforts. 

Thanks to developing a customer persona, you can increase the revenue you receive from your current customers, while also attracting new ones. Customer personas help keep customers engaged and will lead to your conversion rates increasing. 

While it will require some market research and a clear understanding of who you want your target customer to be, creating a customer persona is relatively easy. 

Customer Persona vs Target Market 

Sometimes, ‘target market’ and ‘customer persona’ are terms used interchangeably. However, there is a slight difference. 

Whenever you start a business, you need to identify who your target market is. You cannot be everything to everyone. That is why you niche down and focus on a particular need to be fulfilled. Your target market is largely based on demographics. This includes identifying the target geographic location, age, gender, beliefs, marital status, and income of your target audience. This is a great starting point, but you will need more details to develop a customer persona. 

How to Develop an Accurate Customer Persona?

Developing an accurate and niched down customer persona is vital to customer success, as well as your brand. You want to relate this persona to your brand. Make the information and data points as accurate and specific as possible. It will help you focus all your branding, functions, and features towards that ideal target customer. 

There are many features you can apply to your target customer persona. These can include their hobbies and activities they enjoy doing. As long as these relate to the product you are selling, it will make sense to include them as part of the persona. If they don’t, you should not add them. 

Let’s start from the beginning. 

You should give your customer persona a name. This gives it a degree of personality that becomes more human and less abstract. After that, provide them with an age. This should be an age that falls within who your target market is. Also, don’t just give them any name. Look up what the most popular baby names were in the year that they were born and give them one of those. 

Once you’ve got their name and age worked out, you should give them a location for where they reside. Your target market demographics should already feature a country, state, city, or region. However, you need to niche down more than that. In the location they live, do they own a home or are they renting? In either case, are they living in a single-family house, condo, apartment, or something else? If they have a mortgage or pay rent, how much are they paying every month? 

Once you’ve figured out these details, you should begin to compile their personality, given their living situation. You can also include specific story arcs, such as your customer persona being an individual who is single without a partner, which is why they are renting an apartment. They may be someone who travels a lot for business and won’t be spending much time at home. Whatever information you include in the persona, make sure it relates to your brand. 

Determine their income profile. After all, you are running a business, and depending on how much income your target customer makes, they may or may not be able to afford your product. When they make more money, they are likely to spend more of it. 

You should determine whether they have a full-time job in a profession that pays well. Consider what customers goals and concerns are when it comes to their jobs. Your research should involve what their average spending is, based on what income they make and where they make it. 

Once you’ve got this aspect of the persona figured out, you should move on to how their interests will impact their spending habits. How does this person determine whether a company is one they are willing to support? Are they someone who reads online reviews? Do they ask their friends on social media or in person for recommendations? How do they make purchases? Do they buy things impulsively, or do they deliberate carefully before making a purchase? 

Using Your Customer Persona 

Once you have developed a robust customer persona, you can use it to boost your sales conversion rates. This may include updating your landing page or Call to Action. You may also find that it is more advantageous to advertise on podcasts and Instagram over Facebook. You could also glean that emphasizing an offer being available for a limited time will either entice them or put them off. The key is to use the insights from your customer persona to revise and optimize your product and marketing strategy. 

Wrapping Up 

Once you develop a customer persona, you open the door to achieving greater customer success, as well as more revenue. When you niche down to your ideal customer and tailor your product to fit their needs, you ensure they will be satisfied with it and become long-term customers. You will increase your revenue streams as a result, while avoiding the wasting of time and money marketing to the wrong type of customer. You don’t need to just create one customer persona. Create as many as you like, so you can find several ways to appeal to specific kinds of customers and achieve higher customer success. 

WRITTEN BYRitesh Kaul

Ritesh has over 20 years of experience collaborating with customers and adding value to their organizations. In his prior role as head of healthcare practice for a high growth US healthcare tech organization, he built a centralized knowledge house to drive customer-centric delivery.

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