Buyer Personas: Getting to Know Your Customers

Early in May, I was the expert on Erika Heald’s tweetchat #ContentChat. The topic was a deep dive on personas: why they’re important, what (and who) who you need to create them, and how to put them into a format that’s usable and helpful. The conversation was so rich I felt compelled to share some of the highlights — and there were a lot! In Part 1 of the blog series, I covered what you need to know before you start the process of persona development. Now, in Part 2, we’ll dig in and focus on getting to know your customers!  And if you're interested in skipping ahead, read Part 3 . 

Understanding Your Customers

I realize there are a ton of squishy and soft reasons to build personas (e.g., “I read about it online,” “It just feels like I should,” “All the cool kids are doing it,” etc.), but here’s the real reason to do it: you’re trying to target your customer more successfully so your customer can buy more of whatever your selling. With that in mind, it helps to ask yourself the following questions about your customers:

• Who is your most profitable customer?
• Who is your most strategic customer?

​You should aim for creating customer personas that leverage information about both your most profitable and strategic customers. If you’re wondering what the difference between strategic and profitable is, here’s a quick and dirty differentiation:  a profitable customer is the customer that brings in the most money at the lowest cost, the strategic customer is the customer who garners tangible and intangible benefits outside of cold, hard cash that will likely draw additional customers in the long run. 

Once you’ve identified who these customers are (and whether they are the same customers or two different segments), it’s time to start collecting and organizing data to begin build your customer personas.

What information do you need for a persona?

​A persona is a snapshot of the demographic, behavioral, and psychological traits of your best customers and the people who influence them. They are often given their own name and likeness (a photo, a silhouette, etc.), which creates a more memorable “person” to keep in mind when making decisions, writing marketing copy, or creating other communication touchpoints.

In order to best capture your customer, you’ll need to do a little homework. Here are a few things to capture as you get started building customer personas:

• Profitable client/customer data - Dig into your CRM to collect information about top customer sales, profitability, and any other industry data you can. This will help get a sense of where you need to start. The best-selling but low-margin products aren’t going to do you much good, but the high-profitability items will point the way to both the clients/customers and the products/service you want to focus on first. Keep an eye on the peaks and valleys of your sales, to notice any patterns of seasonality and whether that might affect the nuance of the personas you’re building. 
• Client/customer stories - Once you’ve gleaned what you can from your CRM, it’s time to get some human input. Talk with your sales team — about their best customers, about their favorite customers, the evangelical customers who are always sharing their love about what you do. Talk to them about all of the people who impact the early and late-stage purchase decisions so you can get an idea of how to best approach your customers at every stage of the funnel. This can also be where you develop an anecdotally-based sense for trends, but use that as a guide instead of a rule because people (and their perceptions) are fallible. It’s best to stick with data to develop direction and use anecdotal input as a filter through which to look at that data.
• Data from advertising campaigns - Although data from advertising campaigns can be limited when you’re considering how to build your persona, it can help fill in some blanks that might otherwise exist. For example, it can help you identify a demographic set to help you start thinking through where one of your products or services is helping customers overcome a challenge in their life or career. The information you get may not be indisputable, but it can add layer upon translucent layer of knowledge to the picture you already have, creating depth and character in your understanding of your different types of customers. Some advertising data can also supply you with your customers’ interests, buying data, and political leanings that may serve your persona research well. 
• Analytics/online user data - Even if you’re not an Google Analytics guru, it (and platforms like it) can help you understand a few vital details — even without digging too deeply. Here are four things you can pull from Google Analytics to help inform your personas: 
  

Users by time of day. This is found on the Google Analytics homepage and is adjustable from 7 days (the default) to 12 months, to get a wider sample. This shows you when your customers visit your site, allowing you to better understand their habits and best times to reach out to them. Ask yourself: 

• Why are they looking at that time of day?  
• What types of habits would form those sorts of patterns? 
• What could those times say about their lives?

​Conversion rate. This is available under Behavior, Site Content in the left hand bar — navigate to it and choose “landing pages,” then sort by goal conversion rate. This will tell you which of your pages are converting at the highest rate, allowing you to de-engineer those pages and figure out why they work.

​Take some time to evaluate the content in order to see who those pages were intended for. Then take a look at the data you’ve collected in your CRM to better understand the details behind the people buying those services and products. 

“Interests” data. This is found in Audience and under Interests — but don’t stop with just general interest data! Click on “Add Segment” at the top and add “Multi-Session Users” so you can zero in on those people who visit your site frequently. 

Now you can see who visits your site repeatedly (for research, presumably), their interests, and potential confirmations of verticals you might have identified in your CRM research. Use this information to help craft a vision of who these customers might be, and where they might be open to encountering your message. 

• Products + services list - We’re getting closer to reaching out to your living, breathing customers… But we’re not quite there yet. We’ve identified the who, but now we need to talk about the what — as in, what do you want to talk about once you have their attention?  Start with a complete list of your products and services — but keep your scope tight, in order to avoid getting overwhelmed. Pick your most profitable product or service and your most strategic product or service to in order to dive into the world of personas. Use the CRM data and have a conversation with Accounting to understand which are the most profitable. Talk to your leadership team to ensure you understand which ones serve the longer-term company plan. And while you’re focused on those two types of customers, keep an eye out for relationships and situations that allow you to upsell those customers into other products or services you might offer!
• Client/customer to share their experiences - Finally, try to get some information directly from your customers about their experience with your products or services. This piece of the persona research is probably the most important — and I’m not going to lie, it’s arguably the most difficult to get. Why? Take your pick of reasons. Salespeople are protective of their clients and customers. Clients and customers are time-starved and reticent to talk to someone they don’t know. 
  
  You can get around this with a bit of time and patience, however. Work with friendly salespeople when you’re asking for customer input; ask them to join you on calls with customers to ensure that you don’t have to reinvent the relationship. When you do get a customer on the phone, ask them what problems that the product or service have helped them solve. Keep the focus on them and their experience. Seek to understand where the pressures to solve their problem are coming from, and dig into what types of industry issues are impacting those pressures. 
  
  Have a minimum of 3-4 interviews for each major product and service group to develop a clearer picture of your most strategic and your most profitable customers in each of those groups. Even if you have a difficult time getting customers on the phone, don’t give up. There’s no end to the insights you’ll gain from having real conversations with the end users of your products or services.
  

Now that you know your customers almost as well as you know yourself (hopefully), it’s time to start putting all of that information to use and start building your personas! I’ll discuss how in my next blog. But if you missed our first blog, go back and read about how getting to know yourself can set you up for success.

What's Next?

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