Are you confident you’re reaching the right customers online with your marketing efforts? If not, it’s time to define your customer personas. By understanding WHO your audience is, you can create targeted campaigns that attract high-value customers, save money, and evolve your marketing strategy.
This guide will show you why defining customer personas is vital and how to get started.
Why Define Your Customers?
In today’s digital age, customers are bombarded with 4,000–10,000 marketing messages daily. From social media ads to YouTube videos, cutting through the noise requires precision.
Whether a customer is on a Smartphone, tablet, laptop or home PC we are all subconsciously being exposed to marketing messages all day long.
Defining your customers allows you to:
- Understand their needs so you can create relevant messaging.
- Target effectively to maximise your ROI.
- Stand out in an overcrowded marketplace.
How can a business be heard above all that marketing noise?
If you want to effectively reach customers who might be interested in your product you’ll need to learn about them first. This will help you to ‘target’ them.
Targeting your customers will involve you understanding who they are, what they like, what they want, where they are, how they behave and much much more.
Targeting the best customers and how you go about doing that will help you to write an extremely important document – Your marketing strategy.
Benefits of Defining Your Customers
There are 3 big reasons why it makes sense to spend time learning about your customers before you start to market your product.
1. Attract ‘High-Value Customers’
Instead of sending out a blanket marketing message to everyone, a targeted approach will enable you to only reach the people that are actually interested in what you have to offer. It’s all about the old adage of ‘quality of quantity’. Quality = high value. The truth is that the quality of your customer is so much more important than having lots of customers that aren’t really interested in what you do.
Learn about your customers to attract the best and most suitable customers.
2. Save Money on Ineffective Marketing
With a ‘targeted’ approach to marketing you’ll be able to create marketing messages that appeal to your customers. In-turn this means that you won’t waste time, effort and money in creating marketing campaigns that don’t work. Again, this is all about the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
Learn about your customers to create marketing messages that will return on your investment.
3. Future Proof Your Marketing Efforts
Learning about your customers will involve collecting data about them. This data will help you to evolve your marketing as user behaviours change in the future.
As the internet is an ever changing digital environment you’ll want to keep on evolving your marketing messages so that you don’t get left behind. If you haven’t really taken the time to learn about your audience you won’t have a baseline to build from.
Learn about your customers to gain valuable insight into how to adapt and evolve your marketing over time.
Common Messaging Mistakes
Avoid these pitfalls when defining and targeting your audience:
- Thinking your audience is just one type of person or business.
- Ignoring behaviour differences among customer groups.
- Failing to update your personas as your business grows.
- Skipping the thinking step in favour of marketing creation.
How do I start to learn about my customers?
It’s never too late to start learning about your customers. You can start to define your customers right now. If you want to cut through the marketing noise online start with this easy exercise. You don’t need to access any data at this point. Grab a pen and paper and go through the following steps:
Answer these 3 big questions:
Grab a pen and paper, and start with these three questions:
- What is your product? List everything your product or service offers.
- Who might be interested? Consider age groups, locations, business types, hobbies, or life stages (e.g., students, retirees).
- Why might they be interested? Identify reasons your product meets their needs or solves their problems.
This is known as persona marketing – categorising customers into profiles that guide your messaging.
What Are Marketing Personas?
Marketing personas represent the characteristics, behaviours, and needs of different customer groups. Think of them as buckets into which you sort similar customers. For example:
Persona Example 1: Retired People in Yorkshire
- Age: 65+
- Location: Yorkshire
- Interests: Niche hobbies, aspirational living
- Digital Habits: May use Facebook but not Instagram; limited tech-savviness
Persona Example 2: Small Business Owners in South Wales
- Age: 20-50
- Location: Cardiff, Newport, Swansea
- Needs: Innovative solutions, affordable options
- Challenges: Limited resources, high pressure
How many customer personas should you have?
There isn’t a perfect number of customer personas to use. This is because every business is different. The uniqueness of your product or service will dictate how many different groups of customers you may have.
However, defining at least three customer personas to start with will help you to start marketing your product.
How to develop a customer persona?
Developing customer personas is a task that can be achieved using a combination of your own experiences as a business owner and gathering the most useful data insights.
If you want to learn how to create a marketing persona it’s first important to understand that there are two versions of who your customers are.
- The first version comes from your own ideas about your customers. This will be based on your experience as a business owner. It could be defined by your personal insights and feelings about your customers and who they are at the moment.
- The second version is what collected data can tell you. Read our article about data here. Only through combining your own experiences and what valuable data teaches you can you develop useful personas.
Persona development is a cyclical process of learning, tweaking and evolving the different personas you identify. The lessons you learn over time will help you to define and redefine your personas as your business grows.
How do you use customer personas in marketing?
Creating customer personas will help you to create a strategy to reach each group. Profiling or characterising each customer group will give you two helpful sets of insights into reaching them, practical insights and conceptual insights.
Practical Insights could include:
- How long they spend on websites
- What devices do they use to browse online
- When and where do they search online
- Do they live near your business
Conceptual Insight could include:
- What types of content do they prefer?
- Do they share content?
- (If existing customers) What do they like about your brand?
- What don’t they like about you?
- Do they find it easy to engage with you?
- Are they brand advocates?
Both practical and conceptual insights will teach you many things about your customers. Those learnings should inform the different marketing tasks you do to reach them.
Essentially, using persona insights to teach you how to market to that group of customers will show you:
- what to do
- how to do it
- where you should do it
There you have it, a basic introduction to customer personas and why it’s important to learn about your customer before you start to market.
How to create a marketing persona checklist
- Study your existing customers
- Look at your competitors audiences
- Use your experience and data insights to start to sort them into groups
- Ask further questions about their online behaviours to further refine your personas
- Use data insights to discover what those groups of customers value
Persona Marketing with Nivo Digital
At Nivo Digital, we specialise in helping businesses define their audience personas through tailored messaging workshops. If you want to learn more about your customers and improve your marketing strategy, get in touch today
