Are you sold on the idea that it’s beneficial to understand your customer personas?
Hope so. If not, it’s guesswork. When you know who your customers are, where they are, what they love, and what they hate, you can market to them much more effectively.
Customer personas represent each specific segment within your target audience. Fueled by data-driven research, they map the “who” behind the buying decisions of your products or services.
Customer personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well.
What’s more important, traffic or conversions? If you send me 50k people from a classic tractor repair website and 500 from a prominent marketing site, which one is going to be better for my business?
Unless you’re in the pageview business, you should first and foremost care about conversions. Conversions take place when targeted traffic meets relevant offer. It all starts with doing your persona research and understanding what your customers need or want.
If you’ve ever worked at an agency, you know the value of client education. Results aren’t persuasive if reports seem like a jumble of acronyms. Trend lines aren’t impressive if they track metrics that appear distant from business goals.
Retention is the key to building a great business.
When your core product experience brings your users back time and time again, you gain some incredible advantages. You spend less on acquisition, learn from your users faster, and start building a community through word of mouth and referrals.
If you can’t retain your users, you’re going to spend more on acquisition while not growing as quickly. You’ll spread distaste for your product, not delight. Soon, you’ll find that there are no more users out there to churn through.
As marketers, we’re all trying to improve the customer experience and increase conversions. We have these things in common.
However, some marketers are much better at understanding their customer personas and doing the right kind of research than others.
What is comes down to is that delivering a single message to your entire customer base is an inherently flawed strategy. High-value customers, frequent browsers, seldom purchasers, brand enthusiasts and first-time visitors are all differently characterized and must be engaged uniquely.
This is where customer micro-segmentation comes into play.