The Importance of Developing Customer Personas for Effective Digital Marketing

Not all digital marketing strategies are created equal, and the best ones target your audience, not as an indistinctive mass, but as a faceted group of consumers with individual needs and preferences. The aim is to create hyper-personalized, relevant and dynamic communications that reach the right customers or leads at the right time, based on their behavior and/or engagement with your brand.

It is only once you understand a person, in this case your customer, that you can personalize and finetune your business’ customer journey. After all, it makes no sense to invest your time and resources into building out an elaborate Instagram campaign when your target audience is busy browsing Facebook or Twitter.

At its core, there are seven key personas, ranging from the Value Hunter, the Researcher, the Brand Devotee, the Social Butterfly, the Replenisher, the Mobile Shopper and the Gifter.

Some of these names are self-explanatory. We can almost visualize our mobile shopper clicking through their tablet or computer to complete a purchase.

Others might not be as intuitive. For instance, the social butterfly – a common phenomenon of recent years – can be understood as a type of influencer, who shares their knowledge of your product with family, friends and acquaintances. Meanwhile, the replenisher is what we would call a die-hard fan of your brand, who comes back to your products and/or services time and again.

But the question is, how do we create our customer personas?

It all starts with audience research, ranging from surveys to interviews, to find out as much as you can about your prospective audience. It’s equally important to look inward and survey existing customers for their preferences, sorting all incoming data demographically according to age, location, income bracket and other markers.

In this search for our customer personas, finding out what your audience is spending its time on online will be crucial to identifying their preferred channels of communication.

Slowly, we are getting a better sense of who we are talking to and how they are responding to us.

To delve deeper, we need to take a look at the psychographic data, our customers’ goals, pain points and values. For instance, a research study by Cone Communications suggests that approximately 90% of consumers are more likely to purchase a product from a company that supports issues they consider important. The study also indicates that 75% of consumers would refuse to purchase products from a company that goes against their own principles.

For eCommerce businesses, product developers, content creators, SEO experts, digital marketers and business owners, customer personas are vital. At Voke, we work with brands from a wide variety of industries to study their audience makeup through in-depth data research in order to develop – and continuously update – their marketing strategy, leveraging ever-changing technology and customer expectations.