If your customer bumped into you at a cocktail party, would you recognize her?
Unfortunately, for most medium size businesses without a dedicated analytics staff, the answer is likely, no.
Knowing only basic demographic or geographic criteria doesn't cut it anymore. Looking at data that tells me that one of my customers in from western Indiana and other is from norther Illinois doesn't provide me with the detail necessary to customize the experience for these potential customers. And as we all know, it's the personalization and empathetic understanding my customer's journey that we're all trying to better understand.This is where the concept of buyer personas comes into play. If you're not using personas to represent and help you to learn more about your customers, you should read, research, review and get started, now.
That's because once you've created personas, or fictionalized representations of your ideal customers, they will become critical to anything you do related to customer acquisition and retention.
Depending on the type and size of your business, you could have anywhere from 2 to 10 personas that you generate over time. The ones that are most meaningful are created from any qualitative analysis that you conduct (think surveys, interviews, usertesting.com, etc.).
How to Create a Buyer Persona
Some people call this the fun part, others have a different view because it involves real work!
- Interview a few key customers, in person if possible, but via phone is OK too. I am constantly amazed how eager the right customer is to speak (over-share? about their experience.
- Utilize forms on your site that capture important information relevant to your persona, items that you're unlikely to get any other way. Things like company size, favorite social media platform and job title category are great nuggets to help you build around.
- Talk to your sales team about the leads they are most recently interacting with? Are there any immediate trends that can be gleaned?
- Negative personas are also important. These insights could include job titles that are likely too senior for what you're selling, or students for whom your product is too expensive.
Going through the exercise to create these personas is at it's core, an exercise in segmentation, which if done right can really help you lower your overall customer acquisition cost.
For example, when mapping out persona 'A,' you can determine where this prospect is likely to be on their customer journey and provide them with the most highly targeted content and the most opportune time.
Finally, here are the five questions that have served us (and our clients) best, when conducting interviews to build accurate and empathetic personas. Out of our list of 30 to 40 potential questions, these are the ones that we make sure we get answered because that most closely predict our likelihood of success with a particular prospect.
- What sources do you use to keep up to date with your job responsibilities?
- Describe a recent purchase. What was your evaluation process like? What was the determining factor?
- Are you actively involved in off-line networking groups or associations?
- What happens during a typical day if it has been a successful one?
- Have you received a promotion since you've been at your current employer?
You can learn a lot more about buyer personas and other elements of the Growth Driven Design process from these to posts below, or by downloading our eBook on How to Nail Your Next Web Redesign.
