This article introduces an easy to use but powerful tool – Customer Personas. The Customer Persona technique is a visual way to describe your existing and potential customers’ needs, worries and aspirations.
If we want to grab our readers’ attention in a very noisy world, we best succeed if we are mindful and respectful. In other words, if we take the time to get to know our customers.
For example by asking ourselves how our product or service can help a customer be more successful, more confident, less worried?
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Too much information bothers all of us!
Statistics tell us that the average person receives 63,000 words of new information every day (Business Week).
How about you? How do you feel about information? Do you get too much irrelevant stuff? Do you sometimes suffer from information overload?
If you have this negative feeling of plenty, your existing and potential customers are most likely to have it too!
To protect ourselves from being overwhelmed, most of us simply limit the inflow.
We will read and sign up for information only if it’s truly helpful and relevant to us, at this given moment of our professional and personal life.
As for the rest, we trash, unsubscribe or generally ignore: consciously or unconsciously.
So, to be smarter than the competition, we have to start by reviewing our current approach.
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Customer Personas show us the way.
Customer Personas are archetypes. They provide a framework that helps us describe our target audience in an intimate way. Indeed, a persona – if crafted with care – is much more than a customer segment on a marketer’s grid.
A well developped customer persona is like a close friend we’ve known for years.
With close friends we feel comfortable, we resonate and we’re more easily able to fine-tune our communication.
A friend going through a painful divorce, for example, will need words and attention much different from the teenager whom we must nag into doing his homework.
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Now it’s your turn.
Learn about Customer Personas by taking the 3 next steps:
1. Watch the 2.5 minute video here below.
2. Download and read a practical example, developed for an Asset & Wealth Management Bank.
3. If you are inspired by the above, create your own Customer Persona! For easy implementation, download the Customer Persona template (Word 2010 format).
What’s your first impression about the Customer Persona technique? Are you convinced and planning to use it in your company?
I am sooo curious! Please drop a comment (here below) and let me know what you think.
The featured photo is kindly provided
by Twig Aho via Flickr under the Creative Commons License.