Companies often use different forms of segmentation to help understand and target an audience. They may dive deeper into general details about the average customer – such as their demographic, gender, and socio-economic status – to create one of the most useful tools for driving effective executive decisions – personas. So, what do customer personas do for your business? How could they impact sales tactics?
A Tool For Business
From Econsultancy’s Content Strategy Best Practice Guide, personas are highlighted as one of the most effective ways of bringing details on customer demographics to life. Personas are fictional representations of segments of buyers based on real behavioral data. This makes it easier for companies to make decisions in the shoes of the customer. A persona also contains information about customer goals, needs or wants, challenges and objections as related to your business.
Customer personas’ utility lies in how effective they are understanding the different types of buyers and their decisions when it comes to your products or services. Research takes the most time and effort during the persona development process. Personas are based on different forms of qualitative and quantitative research that focus on:
- Behaviors – You must never assume everything about your audience, but once you identify your customers’ goals, what they want to accomplish, and their journey to finding your business, you can analyze certain behaviors to help make better decisions for them.
- Mindsets – Your customers may have certain expectations or biases on certain things from your business. It’s crucial to learn how to work with these preconceived thoughts and develop a relationship throughout the buying experience.
- Barriers – Being mindful of issues or concerns your customers may have can save you future headaches that can occur further down the sales pipeline.
Personas' Impact on Sales
Specifying the Right Form of Advertisements
Many people will come in contact with your ads, content, or direct links. Personas help all teams share the same story and customer demographics can assist on advertising and marketing teams to spend wisely on ad placements. Personas may give an idea of the language your customers use and the websites they browse.
In Google AdWords, for example, you can use the same keywords that customers use to make your ads are more relevant and improve your ad click-through rates. Ad placements on specific pages may help customers better identify themselves with your brand and have your website and social media feeds seen by the right customers.
- A case study on Watchfinder posted on the Google Analytics blog showed that re-targeting their site users with messages relevant to employees at the large investment banks increased the average order value on the site by 13% with an overall return on investment after 6 months of 1300%.
Improving Prospect Searching & Traffic Inquiry
When you have accurate customer personas, you can highly personalize your questions for more effective sales searching and call preparation. Salespeople tend to waste a large amount of time and effort when they do not know who their clients are in the business. With personas, this shifts dramatically as sales teams can know how to better communicate with prospects. The more definite your customer persona is, the easier time your teams will have to locate customers and deliver products or services to them.
Refining Content Marketing Practices
Aligning both your marketing and sales teams should be one of the main priorities for your business. Personas help to bring together both teams and provide a better understanding of your target audience with psychographics. Once you know your customers’ needs and requirements, you can inform smarter content decisions that will attract more qualified leads with a higher chance of converting customers.
- One case study with Skytap shows that when using personas, they were able to create highly relevant blog posts that impressed visitors and increased their organic search traffic by 55% and converted 124% more visitors into leads.
Progressing The Customer Decision-Making Process
People buy from places they know, like and trust. The more accurately you can identify and describe clients’ problems, the more trust you create for customers and progress in the steps made in your sales funnel to help solve their problems. With a clear buyer persona, you may receive more repeat business from your target audience that perceives you as a specialist, which improves the quality of your relationships with customers.
Personas can also help companies build relationships with the right people, and allow you and your teams to partner with people your personas love. For example, by utilizing influencers that appeal to the right customer, companies can be sure they are making smart investments based on information from customer personas.
Customer personas are in the end a tool, and they are only as good as the people using them. With extensive market research and customer personas backing a well-informed sales team, companies can provide tremendous and continuous insight on how to create better user experiences, persuasive content, or pricing models. Turn insight into action and focus on the main takeaways from your research to model personas out of data that serve whatever goals you’re attempting to attain.
