Have you ever had the feeling that something isn’t quite “clicking” with your company’s marketing?
If so, ask yourself now, how much do you know about your current customer personas? Are they still the right personas for your company’s goals? Maybe, you’ve been selling to the wrong person, or you have failed to understand the person you are selling to.
The foundation of every effective marketing or sales funnel is understanding your ideal customers, what motivates them, and what issues they need to solve. A thorough grasp of your customer personas is essential for content production, messaging, and everything else related to customer acquisition and retention.
Perhaps, it’s now time for you to re-evaluate your customer personas and if you think they need a tweak, here are the 6 epic steps on how you can update your ultimate customer persona:
1. Review your existing buyer personas.
You worked so hard to establish an incredibly detailed customer persona for your company, but do you also adjust your buyer persona and marketing methods as your company evolves?
If not, you should need to examine them now.
They might be able to help you solve problems like “wrong fit” customers, marketing or messaging that isn’t delivering the outcomes you want.
But how?
Do some research and review your customer data and surveys to analyse. You have likely built a significant quantity of customer data since you originally developed your buyer personas, so leverage this to help update the personas.
Begin by looking at who you already do business with and who you want to reach out to expand your customer base.
Examine if your personas are keeping up with the fast pace of change. Check their demographics, goals, pain points, and psychographics. Evaluate what drives your customers to respond and what helped them decide to convert?
You must also ensure that you keep up with your customers’ increasing needs as technology progresses. And if they’re not aligned with all your marketing and sales strategies, it’s time to update them.
2. Ensure your buyer personas are updated with your company’s goals.
Once you’ve examined them, you need to align them with your company goals.
If your company strategy is evolving, then your personas likely need to grow as well.
List down your business goals, short-term and long-term, and then see whether your personas are aligned with each.
Alignment across your teams improves when you have a strong understanding of your personas and how they support the achievement of your company’s goals.
3. Communicate with your team
After ensuring your customer personas and corporate goals are in sync, you should share your findings with the rest of your team so everyone is on the same page.
You should be able to have a brainstorming session with your team to see whether these personas would work for your organisation.
Your team can also help you draft a back story for each persona. They can combine survey data with behavioural data analysis to get that degree of insight. This is an enormously effective approach to delivering a complete story beyond self-reported customer feedback and doesn’t require extra surveys or interviews.
Analyse how your customers get to the point of purchase? Take a look at your buyer’s journey to see if there are any signs about how to improve your buyer personas.
You can then create tailored marketing and communications that more easily resonate with your target demographic. It also enables you to compare those customers to the broader public, improving and enhancing your brand messaging and focusing on the right target market across all parts of the organisation.
4. Do the revision
Now, it’s time to revise.
In this step, you must choose the appropriate template for your buyer personas. You can find several tools to create your buyer persona by searching on Google, or you can stick with what you have right now. Here is the template we use at Ellivate that you can download.
You’ll also need to figure out how many buyer personas you’ll make. According to Hubspot, you can have as few as one or two personas, or as many as ten or twenty, depending on your industry. However, keep it simple because the more personas, the more messages and likely misalignment you create across your business.
Here are some of the steps to update your customer persona:
- Start filling in your persona’s basic demographic information
- Fill out your persona’s motivation, goals, pain points, personality, and objections
- Include some quotes from your interviews that illustrate your personas’ concerns
- Start to craft the brand messaging for your persona
- Develop a clear value proposition
There you go; you should now be done with updating your customer personas on paper. This will help you target your audience more effectively. It also shows you how to respond to their objections and, more importantly, ensure all teams can articulate your organisation’s value proposition.
5. Input your new buyer persona in your CRM platform
Now that you’re done revising, you can upload your buyer personas to your CRM platform.
Your Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a database that stores all your customers’ information. If used correctly, it will include all the information you’ll ever need to create your company’s ultimate customer personas.
The information and data gathered at this stage constitute your buyer persona and serve as the foundation for your product feature development and optimisation.
After they’ve been entered into your CRM, you can already send tailored or targeted marketing campaigns to contacts that match your buyer personas. More importantly, you have a single location for all personas that are easily accessible for your go-to-market teams to access and use as preparation for customer meetings and outreach activity.
6. Check to see whether your new buyer persona is effective
Since you’ve already updated your customer personas, it’s now time to put it to the test.
When you know your buyer personas, you can build sales and marketing tactics specifically targeted at those you know are suitable matches for your business.
Here are some suggestions for developing a marketing and sales plan for your customer personas:
- Assist your sales, marketing, and customer success teams in becoming familiar with each persona
- Develop ad campaigns based on each persona’s preferred platform
- Create content that addresses the unique pain points and difficulties your buyer personas have identified
- Examine your current material to see whether it speaks to one or more of your personas; make adjustments if this isn’t the case
- Improve your landing pages to communicate with buyer personas in their language
- Roleplay and coach your team around how they are conversing with each persona to ensure messaging is consistent and effective across your sales and customer success teams
Customer personas are dynamic, and you’ll want to review them frequently as you learn more about your customers. You can use analytics and surveys to acquire more information, alter existing personas, and even build new ones as your client base grows.
Ready to Update Your Ultimate Customer Persona?
With these 6 epic steps, you can now identify and communicate with your target customers significantly more successfully than you could if you were scaling blind. Take the time to get to know your target audience, and they’ll be a lot more open to your message and the solutions you offer.
If you need some help with creating your customer personas and want to discuss how to take your business to the next level, schedule a FREE 30-minute appointment with me. I’ll be glad to assist you in achieving your business goals.
