Customer personas are a fantastic way to get to know your audience, helping you target your products and services to them a lot easier.
If you’re not creating customer personas for your business, you’re missing out on the opportunity to understand what makes your customers tick (and buy).
Today, we’re going to look at what a customer persona actually is, how you create a customer persona, why you need to create them, and why they’re so important to your company’s continuous growth.
Let’s get started!
What is a customer persona?
A customer persona (or buyer persona/user persona) is a fictional character that you make up to represent your ideal customer. It’s usually based on market research and any data you’ve collected from your existing customers.
When creating your buyer or customer persona you should include:
- Customer demographics
- Their behavior patterns
- Your customer’s motivations and goals
- Their age, gender, and occupation
The more detailed you are with your personas, the easier it will be to address their wants, needs and concerns - and market your products and services towards them more effectively.
Buyer personas are a big help when it comes to building up a strong insight into what your customers are like. A detailed buyer persona will allow you to focus on what parts of your business appeal to your customers. It’ll help you align your services with what your customers want to see.
With strong customer personas at your fingertips, you’ll be able to attract more valuable visitors that will more likely convert and become a paying client for your auto shop.
How do you create a buyer persona?
Buyer personas require a lot of time, patience, research, and strategy. If you want to construct the perfect persona to represent your target audience then you need to start by asking yourself some questions.
You need to define exactly who you want to attract to your company, what you have to offer and why.
By being thorough with your analysis you’ll be able to gather a lot of key details about your target audience. The more details you have about your target market’s driving motivations, the more effective your customer personas will be.
The questions you ask about your audience will help you lay the foundation to keep them coming back for more from you.
Customer persona questions can include:
- How old are they?
- What do they do for a living?
- How do they spend their money?
- What do they do for fun?
- What other hobbies do they have?
- What keeps them up at night?
- Where do they hang out?
- Why do they enjoy restoring cars/improving their vehicle’s performance?
- What do they look for in an auto shop?
- How can you give them the perfect solution to their problems?
Answering these questions will help you create a base of what your ideal customer is like. If you want your customer personas to be detailed, you’re going to want to move beyond these questions and ask more in-depth ones that are specific to your ideal customer.
You want to really get to know your target audience so you can understand them as people, as individuals with their own problems, wants and desires. If you can understand them then you can figure out how you can give them what they want.
For example, start thinking about:
- What do they do at the weekend?
- How old are they?
- What does their family life look like?
- What motivates them to get up in the morning?
- What are their aspirations?
- What would they change about their life?
- What do they like to read?
- Where do they go to find out about your industry?
- What social media do they use?
When answering these questions, think about how you can communicate your unique selling point (USP) to your customers. If you can figure out what sort of person your target customers are then you can figure out what makes your company unique to them.
Focus on what each customer persona needs and wants from you and how you can benefit their lives. This will make it easier for you to connect with them and convert them into repeat paying customers.
How do customer personas help your business?
Figure out where customers spend their time
With customer personas, you’ll be able to see where your customers are spending their time online. You can figure out if they’re more active on Facebook, Instagram, or other social media and aim your marketing to that platform.
There’s nothing worse than putting a load of effort into a social media campaign and then getting 0 engagement back. Customer personas give you unique insight into the behavior of your audience, making it easier for you to market towards them.
You can also use these personas to figure out if you want to target local customers or customers across the states. This will help you market to their specific area with targeted ads to attract them to your site.
Speak their language
Having customer personas helps you figure out what sort of language your target audience speaks. We’re not talking about whether they speak French, German, or English but how they talk online.
For example, do they use slang words or emojis? Are they formal or informal? This is all information you should take into consideration and it’ll help you connect with your target audience.
Creating persona-specific content
Instead of making content that is specific to you and what you think will look good on your site, your customer personas can help you create content that will inform, engage and entertain your target audience.
You’ll already know what your target audience likes and dislikes from your customer personas, so now you know what you should start posting on your blog and social media profiles.
Customer personas are a great way to get to know your target audience and they’re perfect for helping you attract more customers to your business.
If you want to attract new customers to your business with innovative online marketing,
get in touch today.
