What are personas and why they are important?

In short, personas are bespoke categories which describe important characteristics of your clients or customers, so you can group and understand them better and market to them more successfully.

“Personas are a distillation of your ideal client. The essence of a great customer”

What is important to remember is that they are fictional, they are not real people. What I mean by that is that they are there to help you group people with matching characteristics and traits together. They are not an actual person who must match every aspect perfectly to fit in the persona. Real people are all unique in some way, so to try and make a persona a real person is folly.

Personas are a filtering of the important traits, characteristics, wants, needs, desires and fears of your customer. They represent your ideal customer or a segment of your market, depending on your business, it’s size and the type of customers it serves.

Understanding your customers, better

Personas make it easier for you to understand your customers or clients. It gives you a greater insight into how they will behave and react to your marketing, messages and products. Because of this greater insight they give, you can better predict outcomes. It becomes easier to put yourself in their shoes and start to think and react as they would to better know how you can improve your marketing.

You can use them to differentiate your best customers from your good customers and ultimately your unwanted customers. Not only can you have personas based on your different market segments and customer types, but also personas for those you don’t want as customers. Those that are not a good fit for your business, product or service and therefore cause more of a headache than profit. This is an important aspect of personas that many businesses miss. It can be just as valuable to understand what you are not looking for, as to what you are looking for.

Personas help you save money. You don’t waste money trying different marketing, packaging and services that are not of interest to them. With greater insight and knowledge comes better understanding and higher predictability.

Personas are Helpful for staff

They help your staff understand your customers.

You may have worked in your business for many years. Over those years you have subconsciously learned to recognise potential good customers from those that are a bad fit. You get a feeling when you first meet and talk to them, who is going to be a good customer and who is not. Usually its something you can’t quite put your finger on, a bit like a 6th sense. But this very hard to explain and teach staff within your business.

The 6th sense you recognise above is the persona of that ideal client. If we can extract it from your knowledge and experience within your business and get it down on paper, then we can start to educate your staff on what signs and traits to look for when starting relationships with potential customers.

They influence your keywords and content

Personas help you decide what keywords are important to your business and what content is most important in your website, social media and advertising.

Once you understand what is important to your ideal client, what their hopes, dreams ambitions and fears are, you have a better idea of which keywords or key-phrases will work better in your advertising. You will also know what you need to write about and produce content on based on their needs, fears and desires.

By writing about these particular aspects and demonstrating your expertise, empathy and knowledge the selling becomes easier. Your ideal client sees that you ‘get them’ and that builds trust between you and them.

You can see the gaps on your website, where you may have missed content which is important to them. It helps uncover those gaps and you can then start to solve the question about why people visit your site but don’t then contact you.

Personas feedback

Alternatively, if you measure, say, Google Ads and the keywords which lead to clicks and sales, then these can be fed back into your Personas. We can see what our ideal customers are interested in and feed these needs and desires back into our personas to bolster them and make them more accurate.

Personas are never done and they are constantly changing as we learn more about our ideal client. They live in an ever-changing world of differing influences, so we must also change with them.

How many Personas do you need?

Personas are unique to you and your business. You may only have 1, for 1 particular type of customer you have, you may have 20. It all depends on your business, your services or products and the markets you serve.

You may start with 1 or 2, but as you learn more about them and evolve your persona, these may split into 4 or 6. It’s a journey of discovery and understanding and the more you delve and uncover, the more accurate, cost-effective and successful your marketing and sales becomes.

With a persona, we build empathy with the end user. We show an understanding of their needs, wants, desires and fears. And we build trust with them as we understand them better than our competitors.

Personas are integral to your marketing

XposureHUB starts and ends with personas.  Helping you connect to the right people at the right time with the right message. They are a fundamental piece of the marketing jigsaw, which is constantly evolving to make sure your marketing is working at optimal performance. Ultimately helping you sell more to more for less.

If you would like to know more about how personas can help you in your business, please get in touch by phone or email. Take a look at our flagship service XposureHUB which uses personas to great effect in delivering marketing, leads and sales. It reduces the waste in marketing spend, increases your sales conversions and overall saves time and money. It’s just a different approach to doing marketing sales to the way you are doing it now.