How to Develop Customer Personas that Drive Growth & Retention

Recently, we published an exercise your team can use when developing a brand story to launch a new company or product — or to reposition an existing brand. 

Today, we’re diving deeper into an important aspect of your marketing strategy — developing customer personas.

You may be thinking “I already know my customers.” And while this may be true, it’s important to validate your customer personas as your brand or product evolves. Taking the time to develop validated customer personas that inform your strategy ensures that anyone representing your company will deliver the right message to your target customers based on what the customer needs or desires.

This mindset from Professor Kotler played a critical role in shaping how marketing is taught at the Kellogg School of Management, where I had the pleasure of working with some of the greatest marketing and innovation leaders. And while the quote has been around for some time, it remains popular because it rings true.

Putting your customer at the center of your marketing leads to greater connection, acquisition, retention — and ultimately, growth. And as your products evolve and your team grows, so too do your customer segments and prospect opportunities.

For example, years ago, I was working as the Content Director for a tech career platform. As a startup, we’d found great success working with other startups. But in order to grow, we needed to begin working with larger, more established companies. 

Our sales team did a fantastic job of establishing relationships with prospective enterprise customers. However, the initial feedback was that they didn’t think we could handle the scale of their needs. This was largely because our marketing content wasn’t geared toward this new customer segment. 

To remedy this, I partnered with our sales and marketing teams to develop a new brand story and pitch deck geared toward enterprise customers. We invested the time and effort to build our enterprise customer personas, and spent extra time collaborating with our first enterprise client to create a new customer offering. Then, we templated this experience to onboard additional enterprise clients, which drove continuous growth for the company. 

But without looking at that initial feedback as an opportunity to learn from, and partner with, a new prospective customer, we would not have understood our enterprise segment, and may have missed out as a result. 

Customer personas are detailed representations of your ideal customers, based on research and data. Persona details may include everything from industry, company size, leadership status, geographic or age demographics, and more. Developing accurate customer personas allow businesses to tailor your products, services and marketing to meet the needs and preferences of your target customers. Again — taking it back to what Professor Kotler said.

Below, we'll dive into how you can design, test and validate your customer personas.

Start by collecting as much customer data as possible. This includes demographic information such as age, gender, location, income level, occupation, industry, company seniority, and more. You can collect this data through surveys, customer interviews, customer feedback, as well as your marketing analytics through tools like Google Analytics and Sprout Social.

Once you have collected enough data, look for common patterns and trends among your customers. Pay attention to similarities in behavior, preferences, pain points, and goals. These patterns allow you to identify different customer segments within your target audience.

Based on the insights gained from your data, create detailed customer profiles for each segment. Make sure to include information on their background, job, role, hobbies, interests, challenges and goals. Give each of your personas a name and photo. This humanizes each persona, making it easier for others to understand.

Make sure to prioritize your personas based on factors such as profitability, market size, and strategic importance to the growth of your company. For example, I recently partnered with a two-sided marketplace that needed to grow the demand side of the business. We made investments in marketing to our customer personas that fueled the demand, while continuing to organically grow the supply side of the business. Doing so enabled them to grow faster, while creating a better experience for both sides of their market.

After creating your initial personas, it’s important to test them in the real world. Connect with your customers to schedule interviews, send email surveys, and run focus groups that represent your target audience to gather additional information and insights. This means you can validate your personas before investing time and money on your marketing activities.

Even after you have validated your personas, remember this: as your business evolves, your target audience will change. Which means that you should regularly look back at your customer personas and refine or redesign them to accurately represent your product offerings. Use your analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your marketing. Track key metrics like customer acquisition, retention and satisfaction to see how well your personas are performing. And don’t forget — have real conversations with your customers. Sometimes your greatest discoveries come from qualitative experiences, versus quantitative data alone.

Put yourself in the mindset of your customers to understand their needs, desires, motivations, goals, challenges, pain points, and what value your product can offer. Keep your customer top-of-mind when creating your content and digital marketing campaigns. Remember, they’re the hero, not you.

Bill Gates famously said “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” At Storyworthy, we know this to be true. I have worked within, or consulted for, teams in which we uncovered insights that led to new product ideas, or product releases that greatly improved the overall customer experience. 

In addition to understanding who your customers are, it’s also helpful to understand who your customers are not. Creating “Negative Personas” helps your team clearly define which customers are not a good fit for your products or services. Taking these prospects out of the equation early on will help you save resources to put toward the customers that are a great fit. 

Remember, it's important that everyone in your company — from marketing to sales to customer success — has a deep understanding of your target customer. Create a customer persona and messaging library that every team member can access when preparing internal and external marketing, communications, sales or product content. And don't forget to tailor your messaging for each audience persona.

By following these steps, you can create customer personas that drive growth through customer acquisition and retention.  

Need help developing your customer personas? Contact our team to kick off a conversation. hello@storyworthystudios.com