What is a client persona and what impact does it have on exceeding your bottom-line goals?
If you follow what high-achieving brands do, you’ll identify the various types of clients your firm wants to attract and retain. Specific characteristics are documented for each category of client—a name and image of a typical client is also added to the details. These individual client personas are useful to help drive communication strategy, improve services and offer new ones. It is a profile you create, based on both data and educated guesses, that represents your target audience.
Creating client personas gives you solid information on your readers/customers so you can improve your communications and build better services and solutions.
Beyond the basic customer profile and CRM entries
A persona goes beyond the typical customer profile that your business development team may have on file or in a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
To start developing a client persona, take note of demographics, title, and education level. Then dig deeper:
- What are this client persona’s goals, priorities, lifestyle, fears and aspirations?
- What drives them?
- What are their challenges?
Get input across the board
You’ll have a more accurate profile if you get a cross-section of stakeholders to help create each persona. Each stakeholder in your organization will have a different view to bring to capture an accurate client persona. Documenting exact words, phrases and questions from real clients can be a great addition to the corresponding client persona profile.You’ve created a client persona, now what?
The next time you write copy for your website, blog or video script, keep the client persona in mind. Communicate to that person. Put yourself in that person’s shoes and reach out to them with empathy, an exacting voice and on a level that person can understand.
Can doing the hands-on work of creating persona really be a game changer?
The results speak for themselves: 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. Companies who exceed lead and revenue goals (64.7%) have updated their personas within the last six months. Source: The Market Advisory Network.
What can you do today to take steps toward creating client customer personas? If you already have a few, it may be time to freshen those personas.
