The Absolute Importance of Understanding Personas: Targeting as an Art Form

You could easily say creating customer personas is the marketing equivalent to writing fiction. It works similarly by creating characters you care about and sometimes basing them on real-life people. While you may debate the idea of customer personas being close to fictional character creation, consider how much you can learn by creating an imaginary customer.

This is the true intention behind customer personas where you create a fictional consumer based on the traits of prior customers or gathered data. You want to turn the vague customers you're targeting into real people before creating marketing content for them.

Regardless, you've perhaps avoided creating personas out of thought you know enough based on general assumptions or product features. You're basically going on second-guesses this way and may run into problems later during your marketing campaign.

Creating Correct Content

Do you really know what prospective customers want to see in the way of your content? Without knowing exactly what your demographic wants, you'll again be aimless in creating content you know gets valued. When content doesn't fit what your customers need, it only wastes money since you'll have to correct errors or start over from scratch.

The key here is to create content touching on pain points when finding behavioral information. While you want to find out other important aspects about your customers, honing in on what their problems are creates a powerful, personal connection.

Forming direct content addressing these problems provides you a long list of subjects to write about in your blogs and other media. Focusing on pain points makes customers feel like you truly understand them on a profound level rather than merely selling a product to them without reason.

Identifying Where Customers Spend Time Online

Another essential aspect to customer personas is finding where customers spend time online. If just going by generalities, you may realize they spend time on social media. The real question is: Which social media channels do they spend the most time on?

Knowing which channels, you get a tighter focus on which social media sites to place your content. Posting content on every social media platform only wastes time when your targeted demographic may only hang out on Twitter or Facebook.

This extends to another vital part of customer personas: What customers want in content.

What Content Would Your Customers Want to See?

Finding out what content your customers usually consume helps create valuable content you know they'll value. It's not always about pain points, and many customers prefer to read educative information before making a buying decision. It's especially this way in the B2B industry.

Creating content you know attracts customers works as inbound marketing where people search specific content through keywords. In the tech field, this is an important aspect to differentiate from your competition.

Guiding Product and Service Development

Customer personas help you shape the product and service you bring so it suits what consumers demand. For tech products like apps, you'll want to find out what your customers prefer in features and leave it open for revisions based on persona research.

The same goes for the type of customer service your targeted consumers like. With tech support being a major part of providing successful apps, you'll attract the perfect customer when giving them service they expect.

It's well worth your time to over-invest in creating customer personas since it makes targeting a true art form. Because competition in business is more intense than ever, understanding every morsel about future customers nurtures long-term loyalty.