What is Customer/User/Buyer Persona?

In the Marketing world, knowing your customers, their interest areas, their preferences, makes the difference between closing a sale or losing it.

While some people may describe a Buyer Persona as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers, you need to understand and use the buyer persona more effectively. Such people will also provide you with an excel template and urge you to spend a month and couple of thousand dollars to arrive at a buyer persona.

Be aware, a buyer persona is not semi-fictional, and it is not necessarily a representation of your ideal customer base. Your quest should not be to find just the ideal customer segment. Instead, you should thrive at knowing all about your customers, their interests, so that you can have a more meaningful relationship.

Buyer persona is not semi-fictional, and it is not necessarily a representation of your ideal customer…
Click To Tweet

As an example, if McDonald’s was to do a research to create a buyer persona, they would not be in the quest of finding their ideal customer base. Rather, they would attempt to understand that 40% of their customers are interested in Minions.

Now they can rebrand their merchandise with Minions and work out some more attractive Minion related marketing tactics. Hence this was neither semi-fictional nor the quest to create a basket of ideal customers.

Retainly Marketing Automation does not ask you to do extensive market research and spend thousands of dollars to create customer personas. Retainly offers you a one-click solution in partnership with FullContact. One-click and you got your automated buyer personas created and segmented. Rest is up to your creativity to engage them.

What is a buyer’s journey?

With the advancement of data science in Marketing, experts have realised that purchase is not a singular event. There are various other events associated with the customer prior to purchase.

The science of tracking all the events in a customer’s lifecycle, giving weight age to those events, and analyzing the common events that are most influential in the final purchase, are collectively referred to as the buyer’s journey.

Attribution is the technical terms commonly used to track such journeys. Google Analytics provides a free attribution tool for you to track the different customer events prior to completing a goal.

What is meant by persona in marketing?

If you are not inclined towards creating customer Personas for your business, you are completely depending on luck for your marketing to show results. That is how strongly I can put it across.

Even before you start developing your marketing strategy your first step is to start building multiple customer personas. Only when you have a couple of personas ready, jump into building your marketing strategy. You will then realise how those customer personas have influenced your marketing strategy. These personas will also help you come up with the right marketing tactics.

Marketers use customer personas even for content marketing. Once you know the interests of your customers, you can send them hyper relevant information surrounding their interest areas. Hyper personalisation is not a thing of the future, it has arrived with tools like Retainly. 6 months back I was writing about Hyper Personalisation in various journals, today I am proud that Retainly is the first Marketing Automation tool to have achieved that.

Soon you will not be receiving emails from your bank that is asking you to apply for their Probationary Officer examinations – non-relevant. The earlier the marketers realise that sending non-relevant or even less-relevant communication undermines your brand and makes the customer lose interest in your company, the sooner will the evolution of marketing take place.

The post Buyer and Customer Personas Automated appeared first on Retainly Stories.