To build Customers for Life, you need to start by creating Marketing Personas. The why? The how and some action steps. In short, it’s really all about the data – how you collect it, analyze it and use it.
What exactly is a Marketing Persona?
Think of it as a semi-fictional representation of your primary customer to whom you aim to market your goods and services – to acquire and retain them. It’s a simple, yet vital perspective: to gain a deep understanding of the attributes of your very best customer, both demographic and psychographic, in order to target more of them!
Minimally, you should be aiming for quantitative and qualitative information including:
- Contact details
- Customer type: Personal Lines,
Commercial Lines, Both? - Email info
- Social info
- Text info
- Product/s purchased?
- $ Amount of purchase/s
- When purchased?
- When re-purchased?
- Amount of times re-purchased?
- When renews?
- Birth date
- How referred
How to Go About Creating Marketing Personas
So how do you go about creating a Marketing Persona? Download your sales data for a set period of time. Your present customers are your best source of information. You know what they buy and over what period of time. You know where they live. If they run a business, and much more. Your producers also know the qualitative stuff: do they have kids, a family pet, whether they are a single parent family. You get the idea.
And here’s the type of information that should emerge when you do a deeper dive:
- Who are you?
- Gender?
- Age?
- Single/Married?
- Education?
- Kids?
- Pets?
- Homeowner?
- Renter?
- Where do you live?
- Car Owner?
- Business Owner?
- Business type/size?
- Income – single/Duo?
- Assets?
- Debts?
- Goals?
- Frustrations?
- Motivations?
- Pain points?
- Product/s of interest?
- Added value you can bring?
- What product considered critical?
- Contact info available?
- Referral opportunities?
- Your access to product?
In addition to your sales and qualitative data, you can also conduct some research: interviews or online surveys. You can add some form fields to your inquiry forms to gather more info when inquirers visit your website. Now your personas are being built with customer and prospect data.
Once this information has been identified it’s time to start developing your personas.
Action time
Gather your team members and explain the process – and how they can help, and why. Pull them into a meeting where the facts may be presented, but “anything goes” in terms of your discussions. Look, if you can come out of this meeting with a decent understanding as to not only who your primary customer is, but also your secondary, even tertiary customer, you are well on the way to success.
Hint: have some fun in this meeting. Blow up a picture or two of your fictional customers and attach post-its that describe their many attributes.
You can also create marketing personas online. Head over to this page to view this awesome tool: https://uxpressia.com/personas-online-tool
