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Marketing and selling your products online is easier when you can put a face to your customers. Without that in-person feel for how your customers think, feel, and act can sometimes make it a struggle to visualise the best way to speak to them. Here's where customer personas come in. As part of your marketing strategy, customer personas are a clever way to improve your communication with online shoppers.
A customer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a profile of the customers you want to target. It is based on information gathered from research and your customer base in real life. The details include more than just statistics, but ideas about the buyer's lifestyle and pain points that lead them to need your product.
Although a customer persona tries to identify clearly the key traits of your buyers, it is not meant to represent your entire audience. You can create a number of personas to illustrate the main types of people you aim to sell to.
There are multiple benefits for creating these profiles to help with marketing, product sourcing, and pricing.
Building buyer personas can streamline your business's sales and marketing efforts. It takes away the guesswork from deciding who you are talking to and how to reach them better. Investing some time into this part of your marketing plan is worth doing to steer your messaging in the right direction and secure more sales.
How customer personas are beneficial:
If you don't have customers yet, collect information online. Look at the websites of your competitors and read the product reviews. What challenges do these customers face that lead them to buy these products and how can you help them better than your competitors?
Reading product reviews can also give an idea of how your target customer thinks and behaves. Even by looking at the way they express their opinions, you can use this information to think about their possible education and lifestyle.
Another great way to conduct research is to create customer surveys. This works well if you have a customer base already. Customer surveys can be sent periodically through the year and after a sale from your online shop. Ask customers questions that will help to build a profile such as age, location, and what they like the most about your services.
Reviewing data from your social media platforms also adds to enrich your buyer personas. Facebook Insights, for example, gives you demographic statistics about those that interact with your posts.
To get to grips with the motives of your customer sales, try to pinpoint the challenges they face and why they need you. Are they renovating a home and need to work on a budget? Are they expecting a new baby and prefer the ease of buying online?
Elevate this further by reviewing these pain points and needs with how they are met by your competitors. Think about how you can set yourself apart, what type of buyer would choose you rather than your competition, and how you excel above others in your market.
Include this information in each of your customer persona profiles.
Now that you have all the data collected, it's time to put the buyer persona together. Review the information gathered and look for patterns and trends. Piece together profiles to represent at least 2-3 buyer personas. Organise your data for each persona into the following categories:
This type of lifestyle profile helps you to see your target customers in a human way rather than just numbers.
To make your personas more detailed, add:
Here are some examples to give you an idea of the type of format to aim for.
Young outdoor dad, Jacob
Grandma-to-be, Victoria
Buyer personas are a handy tool to refer to when developing an advertising campaign, launching a new product, or making improvements to your dropshipping store. Your business and marketing decisions can benefit from this specific customer information you have organised. Make sure to keep these updated as you continue to collect customer data and expand your eCommerce products.
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