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Customer personas are data and research-informed representations of a business’ top or ideal customers. Personas are crucial tools for marketers, as they both drive and inform strategy. At Response Labs, we take a unique approach with each of our clients to help them understand their ideal customers, leverage data to build effective personas and execute effective marketing strategies that utilize personas to boost campaign effectiveness. Read on for a case study on how we developed personas for one of our clients and how you can use personas to enhance your own marketing efforts.
What is a Customer Persona?
Effective customer personas incorporate not just basic demographic data like age, gender, and location, but also behavior patterns, motivators, and consumer interests. Understanding a customer’s behavior, like their buying, visiting, or other habits gives organizations the insights necessary to build meaningful and effective campaigns.
By having a comprehensive understanding of their target audience, businesses can tailor their messaging and approach to appeal to the right customers effectively. This, in turn, leads to increased engagement, better conversions, and ultimately, higher profits.
Developing a Customer Persona: A Response Labs Case Study
To create a customer persona, businesses need to gather quantitative and qualitative data from various sources like surveys, focus groups, social media, and consumer feedback. After analyzing this information, a marketing team can begin to identify critical behavior patterns and pathways that customers take. These then become a business’ unique personas. Once a customer persona is identified, it can be further broken down into specific categories such as primary, secondary, and tertiary personas depending on the target audience’s level of engagement with the business.
Below is a breakdown of customer personas Response Labs identified for a client. We base our communication to each segment on their likelihood to visit again in a certain amount of time, whether in-person or via an online order. Our client’s customers have unique behaviors, so it is key to understand what is going to move the needle for each audience segment.
- A primary customer is a representation of the ideal customer that a business aims to attract and retain. For this client, primary customers are customers who engage with the brand at least once a month. These customers represent the target audience that the client wants to engage with and retain as loyal customers. Primary customers are the backbone of the business, and catering to their needs and preferences is vital for the brand’s success.
- On the other hand, secondary customers represent additional customer segments that may still be significant to the business, but whose behaviors are not in line with that of primary customers. In this client’s case, secondary customers represent a group of individuals who are on the cusp of becoming primary customers. They may engage either in-person or online between 6-8 times a year, and their behaviors indicate that with the right messaging, they would be likely to transition to becoming primary customers.
- Lastly, tertiary customers represent a group of individuals who are likely only visiting for special occasions and may move up to the secondary customer group, but it is not likely that they will become primary customers. These customers may still be valuable to the client, but their behaviors and preferences may differ from the ideal primary customer.
Understanding the differences between these customer segments is vital for developing effective marketing strategies that resonate with each group’s unique needs and preferences. By tailoring messaging and campaigns to the specific needs of primary, secondary, and tertiary customers, businesses can increase the chances of customer engagement and loyalty while allocating precious resources efficiently and thoughtfully.
Putting Customer Personas to Work in Your Marketing Strategy
Leveraging customer personas in marketing is a powerful strategy that can help businesses engage with their target audience. There are a few ways in which businesses can use customer personas to achieve their marketing goals.
- Engage customers where they are now. One of the most significant advantages of leveraging these customer personas, broken down by primary, secondary, and tertiary, is our ability to tailor messaging to each group based on their engagement behavior.
- Understand the potential pain points, interests, and motivations of these different groups to create messaging that is more likely to resonate. Our tailored approach increases the likelihood that the consumer will engage with the content, and convert to the desired behavior.
Here’s what that looks like for our restaurant client.
- In the case of our primary audience segment, users are more likely to visit or engage every 30 days, so maintaining their purchasing habits by updating them on new brand items and leveraging promotions on their favorites has been a successful strategy to maintain these users.
- However, in the case of the secondary audience segment, these users tend to engage less frequently. To communicate effectively with these users and excite them about visiting in-person or online, Response Labs suggested an effective email campaign where a customer would see the image of the item they most recently purchased, and encourage them to come back and enjoy it again.
- Our client also has a relatively large tertiary audience segment. This segment represents individuals who typically enjoy engaging with the brand during special occasions or celebrations. Understanding the events they celebrate will allow for stronger messaging. For example, offering a birthday discount for an individual or offering a discount to a couple celebrating their anniversary are great ways to activate this audience.
Developing more effective campaigns is another advantage of customer personas. By targeting specific customer segments with campaigns that speak to their needs and interests, businesses can increase the chances of conversion and engagement. This targeted approach can also help businesses save on marketing costs by avoiding generic campaigns that do not speak to specific customer groups.
We Can Help You Level-up Your Marketing with Personas
Understanding the goals and pain points of different customer segments allows businesses to create a better customer experience that meets their needs. This leads to increased loyalty and customer satisfaction, ultimately resulting in a more successful business. Plus, by utilizing marketing resources more efficiently and strategically, businesses can make a bigger impact with less.
Do you need help understanding your customers and building customer personas? Response Labs has extensive experience in using our clients’ available audience data to build and execute customer personas. We work closely with our client’s marketing, brand, media, data, and production teams to leverage our findings, build strategies and increase client revenue. We’re here to help you understand the needs of your clients, pair that with your overall business objectives and create compelling, actionable marketing strategies.
If you want to optimize your content, creatives, messaging, subject lines, and more, reach out to Response Labs to learn more – the sky’s the limit!
