Creating Effective Customer Personas for Your Business’s Marketing Strategies

In today’s digital marketing era, you must deeply understand your customers to create effective and impactful marketing strategies. Creating a persona is one of the most effective ways to achieve that understanding. A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your idea customer, based on data and research.

This article will discuss steps to creating a customer persona from your business’s existing sales data, enabling you to improve your marketing strategy, and subsequently achieve better business targets for your business.  

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How to Create a Customer Persona for Marketing Strategies

1. Gather Sales Data

The first step in creating a customer persona is to collate, collect, and analyze relevant sales data. The following are some varieties of the data you and your business need to create a customer persona: 

• Demographic Data is data collated about a customer’s age, education, gender, and geographical location, information that can be obtained from your CRM system or sales analytics; 
• Purchasing History analyzes your customer’s history and purchasing pattern, such as the frequency of the products purchased and their sales value. This information helps you and your business understand their shopping habits and preferences; and 
• Brand Interactions monitor how customers interact with your brand, whether it is through email, social media, or other channels. This provides you and your business insights into their content interests and communication preferences. 

2. Analyze Data to Identify Patterns

Once the data has been gathered, the next step for you and your business to do is to analyze the information, to identify patterns that can help you to create perfect, representative personas. Here are some suggested analytical tools that you can use: 

• Customer Segmentation or Group Customers are based on similar characteristics. For example, segment (group) them by age, gender, geographical location, or shopping habits;
• Trend Analysis observes trends in your sales data to determine which products or services are the most popular during specific time periods, such as morning, lunchtime, or after the regular working hours of 9-5. This can help you and your business to understand your customers’ demands, habits, needs, and preferences; and 
• Surveys and Feedback use customer surveys to gather more data about their habits and preferences by using open-ended questions which can provide your business with deeper insights into your customers’ motivations.

3. Create Customer Personas

After analyzing the collated data and identifying any notable patterns, it is time to craft your customer personas. The following suggests some simple steps towards creating a customer persona:

• Define a Name and Background by giving your persona a background, a history, an identity, a name, et al. For example, Sarah, 30 years old, a marketing Professional; 
• Demographic Characteristics include demographic information, such as age, gender, geographical location, and education. For example "Sarah, 30 years old, White, Single, Bachelors, City Living, Marketing Professional”;
• Goals and Challenges identify the goals that your persona wants to achieve and the challenges that they may encounter. For instance, "Sarah wants to find efficient products to boost her productivity but often struggles to find the right ones.";
• Shopping Preferences note your customers’ shopping preferences, such as their preferred medium (offline or online), the types of products sought, the reasoning behind their purchasing decisions; and their 
• Information Sources, that determine where your persona looks for information before making purchases such as blogs, legacy media, magazines, or social media, and forums such as Ted-Talk. 

ALSO READ: How to Create a Sales Data-Driven Marketing Campaign

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4. Utilize Personas in Marketing Strategies

Once the customer personas are created, the next step is to integrate them into your marketing campaigns’ strategies. The following are some suggestions with which to approach this: 

• Content Customization, or customizing your marketing content to meet the needs and preferences of your personas. For instance, if your persona prefers video content, consider creating more promotional videos, or a Tik-Tok or Youtube montage;
• Ad Targeting uses customer personas to make your target ads more precise. For example, if the persona is a young professional, consider targeting ads on platforms such as LinkedIn;
• Product Development uses insights from the personas to develop products or services that better meet your customers' needs.

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5. Regularly Update Personas

It is important to remember that customer personas are not static documents. Rather, they need to be regularly updated, based on changes in market trends and sales data. The following are some suggestions to update personas:

• Regular Data Analysis of your sales data identifies any changes in your customers’ behavior and preferences; 
• Ask Customers questions and regularly conduct interviews or surveys with them to gather feedback on your business’s products and/ or services; and 
• Monitor Market Trends and keep an eye on industry trends to ensure that your personas remain accurate and relevant. 
  
  

Creating customer personas from sales data is a crucial step in developing more effective marketing strategies, and understanding who your customers are, and what they want and need enables you and your business to customize your ads, content, and products to meet their demands and expectations.

Moreover, remember to continually update your personas to stay aligned with any changes in your customer’s behavior and preferences, because, with the right approach, customer personas will become an invaluable tool in enhancing your business’s performance.