Customer Portal
Have you ever thought about what different groups your customers fall into? By unwrapping each persona, you can create more targeted and effective marketing messages.
A customer persona helps you better understand the needs of a particular client group or segment, and how to be more targeted in your marketing messages to both better serve the customer and gain more sales at the same time.
Our Digital Marketing Team at Twin State Technical Services works with all types of business clients in the Quad Cities area to help them take advantage of multiple internet-based marketing opportunities. One way we help our clients fine-tune their message is through the creation of customer personas.
What is a Customer Persona?
Customer personas, also known as buyer personas, represent your ideal customer. For a landscaping service company, this could be a certain type of business client such as: “a business owner who values well-maintained outdoor areas.”
Your goal is to understand the challenges, needs, and behaviors of each customer persona – i.e., ideal customer type(s) for your products and services. Through this understanding, you can better match your messaging to those distinct attributes.
Some of the ways to create your company’s customer personas are:
- Market research in your industry
- Insights from your team’s interactions with customers
- Client surveys to ask them about key challenges and goals
- Uncovering trends in your CRM database
- Form entry on your website (i.e., add a field such as ‘company size’ to help you identify their persona)
Persona Examples
An example of three possible customer personas for a company that sells landscaping services could be:
- Retailers that need to maintain an attractive storefront to attract foot traffic
- Wealthy homeowners who live in specific neighborhoods where attractive landscaping is expected
- Hotels looking to improve comfort and lower energy costs through strategic positioning of shade trees
What’s a Negative Persona?
The negative persona is the opposite of your customer persona. This is a group you want to avoid marketing to if possible. This could be a client type that takes up an extraordinary amount of time, but hardly ever makes a large purchase with you.
If you sold commercial floor coatings in a minimum size of 5-gallons, a negative persona may be the customer who only wants to purchase a gallon to do a small area and does not have any resale potential, yet costs you the same in time and attention as larger clients do.
Knowing the type of clients that aren’t your “sweet spot” can also be helpful so you’re not chasing down every lead that doesn’t make sense for your bottom line.
How Many Personas Should You Have?
It depends upon your business. The number can vary greatly from 1-2 personas to 10 or 20. But, if you’re just starting out, start with identifying just a few initially.
Using Customer Personas to Market Better
Gaining a better understanding of the types of people who buy your products or services helps you uncover ways you can better serve them and get your value message across.
A big advantage of grouping leads and customers by personas is that you can more easily tailor your marketing to them and also track which personas are the most profitable for your business.
The magic combination that will help you the most is to look at a customer persona and the associated lifecycle stage in your sales funnel to identify the triggers that help specific types of customers with a buying decision.
Persona groups let you tailor your marketing to each persona, meaning your message can be more effective to that group of clients.
For example:
If you’re sending out an email to offer a discount on tax services to both residential and commercial clients, the message can’t be very specific, and might be something like:
“Tax season is just around the corner, start early and save 10% on tax services”
However, if you designate two different customer personas and segment your email lists by commercial and residential, your messages can be much more specific and effective:
Commercial: “Get your small business taxes done before the rush and enjoy a savings of 10% to put back into your company.”
Residential: “We can help you get your tax refund early! Get 10% off with our early bird discount.”
Segmented email campaigns get 100.95% more clicks than non-segmented. (Mailchimp)
When you segment your marketing efforts according to your customer personas you’re more effective and can also better begin to see patterns that help you hone your message and gain more of the types of customers you’re looking for.
Template for Creating Customer Personas
The template below can help you begin to categorize your customers into personas. It will also give you insights into the types of questions you may want to ask new leads to learn what motivates them and what challenges you can help them solve.
Use the Q&A format below to build a customer profile for each lead or customer.
1) WHO:
- Background (Position? Career path? Family?)
- Demographics (Age? Income? Location?)
- Identifiers (Demeanor? Preferred communication method?)
2) WHAT:
- Goals (Primary & secondary goals?)
- Challenges (Primary & secondary challenges?)
- What Can We Do (how can we help this persona achieve goals and overcome challenges?)
3) WHY:
- Real Quotes (Things the client has said about their needs)
- Common Objections (What stops them from making a buying decision?)
4) HOW:
- Marketing Message (How can you best describe your solution to them?)
- Elevator Pitch (How can you quickly get your value message across?)
Get Help Segmenting Your Digital Marketing
Find out just how much more effective your lead generation and sales nurturing can be with messaging tailored to your key customer personas. Twin State Technical Services can help you customize your marketing across multiple areas – social media, video, email marketing, and more.
Let’s get started today! Call us at 563-441-1504 or reach out online.
