Communication is the key to success in marketing. It is critically important for marketers to know who they are addressing and the right way of communicating with them. Besides learning how to communicate with the audience, they must also know when to engage. Getting the act together is far from easy, and marketers must have a perfect understanding of the target audience. Understanding various audience groups’ profiles and other details will make it easy to develop a suitable communication strategy that ensures closer engagement and generates trust. The exercise of knowing the audience consists of creating target customer personas. Customer personas are what personality is for individuals. Customer personas include various data about customer groups that indicate different traits about behavior, taste, likes and dislikes, interests, and many other aspects.
Know your Customers with the help of Target Customer Personas
The market is huge, and marketers must target specific customers in a market niche to market the products or services. They must have clear about the kind of buyers interested in the products or services. Identifying the clusters or groups of customers helps marketers direct their efforts at the right places and develop suitable marketing strategies to connect easily with the targeted groups. The process of identifying the clusters or groups of customers that share many similar traits helps develop target customer segments/personas. Knowing the various details of customers belonging to a particular segment makes it easier to build marketing strategies relevant to the group and resonate with them. Developing customer personas is an attempt to create a sketch of the target audience based on facts collected through surveys and customer interactions.
The Information Available from Customer Personas
Why customer personas are so important will become clear on knowing this information. Customer personas are images of the customer groups created based on demographic data like age, gender, education, salary, and family. It also includes profession/occupation, career, personal preferences, values, goals, hobbies, and recreational traits like traveling, trekking, etc. Further, it can include internet usage patterns, the inclination for apps and technology, shopping habits, preferred mode of communication, privacy, spending habits, etc. Overall, the data should help create customer personas by understanding their expectations, likes, and dislikes. The more data collected, the better it is for developing customer personas which many people call buyer personas.
Focus on the Customer Journey
Knowing the customers helps to achieve the goal of customer-centric marketing strategies instead of one-size-fits-all strategies that simply do not work. Different strategies for different customer groups or personas are the best marketing approaches to address customers in the way that pleases most. To hit the nail, marketers do not just stop by creating customer personas but go a step ahead to align them with the business growth strategies. Connecting with the customers in the right way enhances engagement with the brand and business that marketers must use to their advantage to translate it into business growth by generating more revenue. To achieve the goal, marketers must consider the customer’s location in the buying funnel.
The buyer’s journey starts by inquiring about products or services to gather the preliminary information and then gradually moves along the buying funnel while discovering progressively more and consolidating information to make buying decisions. The stages in the buyer’s journey consist of Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
Develop Communication Strategies
When marketers know the customer personas and even the stage to which they belong in the buying funnel, it becomes easy to understand the best way of communicating with them meaningfully. The expectations of customers keep changing as they progress through the marketing funnel. It is essential to address customers to meet the expectations that culminate in meaningful engagement and drive them closer toward conversion at every stage. The right type of communication will encourage customers to move ahead with purpose.
Developing target customer personas is an essential exercise to give more teeth to marketing and generate more revenue that ensures business growth. The better the communication with customers, the higher the engagement with the brand or business will be, and the higher the chances of conversion generating more revenue and strengthening the business bottom line.
