As a new agency or brand, the biggest headache of growing your business is finding new clients. The reality is that finding new clients is no piece of cake, and most of the time you end up wasting resources on audiences you think will deliver better results.
A lack of understanding of who your client actually is can hinder your company’s growth as well as your position in the industry. You may now be asking yourself how can I know more about who my clients are? And well, the answer is simple, by building a customer persona.
What Is A Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a detailed profile of a fictional person who portrays your ideal customer by highlighting specific characteristics and traits. These characteristics and traits usually include details like age, gender, devices, religion, locations, and more.
Taking the time to build your customer persona is an essential part of any marketing strategy as it offers many benefits to a business.
Here are some of the benefits of building an effective customer persona:
Effective Communication: Having a customer persona helps improve the communication between the company and the client or prospect. Knowing things like your client’s language and interests can help you create content that maximizes their engagement.
Targeted Marketing: Customer personas are an effective way to target your marketing campaigns. Knowing things like your “ideal” customers’ locations, age, gender and more, will help you create an effective marketing strategy focused on delivering results.
Reduce Spend: Tying in with the above, focusing on targeted campaigns can ensure that you are not wasting resources on low-quality leads.
Structures Content Development: Understanding your ideal client’s challenges, struggles, and interests helps you structure content that will be engaging, insightful, and valuable to your audience.
Methods To Help You Collect Your Data
There is not a set of rules when it comes to developing your customer persona, the reality is that this process can change according to the specific industry or product you are working with.
As an example, if you are working with a company that offers various products that may be attractive to different personas, you can create multiple personas to cater to all your product offerings. However, if you are a small agency or brand you would generally start by focusing on one customer persona.
Let’s take a closer look at the different methods you can use to collect data on your ideal customer:
Qualitative Method
The qualitative method follows the principles of a more traditional approach. This method focuses on answering the why of customer behaviour. By conducting interviews with your current clients, inviting clients to focus groups, sending out surveys and questionnaires, you are able to capture valuable insights into the reasons why a customer decided to interact with your brand or agency.
Quantitative Method
The quantitative method focuses on working with data that can provide a more definitive answer to the what, how, and when of a customer’s behaviour. A platform like Google Analytics can be used to provide you with all the data you need to make accurate predictions on your target customer.
If you are new to building a customer persona, the quantitative method provides a more straightforward approach to building a basic yet detailed customer profile. Let’s focus on building a customer persona using data from Google Analytics.
Developing Your Customer Persona With Google Analytics
Here is the data you will need from Google Analytics in order to build your customer persona:
Demographics Data
The starting point of building your customer profile is determining their basic details, such as age, gender, location, and language. To find your ideal customers’ age and gender, navigate to Audience -> Demographics -> Overview.
From this section, you can then conclude which demographics have visited your website the most. Start by focusing on the section with the highest number. If you are looking to build more than one persona, take note of the top demographic groups.
As an example, from the above image, we can conclude that our “ideal customer” would be a Female around the age of 25-34.
Next, take a note of the language and location of this customer. You can find this by navigating to Audience -> Geo -> Language or Location.
Affinity Category Data
Affinity categories are a great way to scope out your “ideal” customers’ interests based on their previous interactions with the web. This data will give you enough information to make valid assumptions about their lifestyle. In your Google Analytics account, navigate to Audience -> Interest -> Affinity Categories.
As an example, we can see from the below screenshot that our “ideal” customer interests, based on revenue generated, are Shopping and Beauty/Wellness.
In-Market Segment Data
In-Market Segments provide a great way to further highlight who your persona is by outlining their behaviours. Google Analytics will show what segments contain users that are more likely to purchase a product or service in that specific category. In your Google Analytics account, navigate to Audience -> Interest -> In-Market Segments.
As an example, we can see from the above screenshot that our “ideal” customer is more likely to be ready to purchase products related to Home/Gardening and Vehicles, based on conversion rate.
Devices Data
Lastly, compiling data on the devices used will help you optimize your content. You can use device-related information to help you target your marketing strategies. In your Google Analytics account, navigate to Audience -> Mobile -> Devices.
As an example, we can conclude from the above screenshot that our “ideal” customers are more likely to convert through a desktop.
Building Your Persona
Let’s bring this all together! Now that you have all the information that you need you can start building your customer persona profile.
Here is how we can build a profile based on the examples mentioned in this blog:
Name: Sarah (Female)
Sarah is 27 years old and currently lives in South Africa. She speaks English and her main interests are Shopping, Beauty, and Wellness. Sarah cares about her personal well being. Sarah spends a lot of time on her phone, however, when she is ready to make a purchase she would rather use a desktop. She is more likely to purchase a product or service related to Home/Gardening and Vehicles.
Set Yourself Up For Success…
You can now see how easy it can be to build a customer persona using data from your marketing channels. Start building your persona today to help you drive better results for your campaign!
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