Solving the pain points for a potential client is a tremendous way to gain new customers and create loyal patrons. But how can a service provider solve the problem for a potential customer if they don’t know who their own customers are? Creating a customer persona is a necessary tool to better understand your average potential client, what pain points that person usually faces, and how you can solve their issues to turn that person into a paying customer.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a creative model that showcases key traits, demographics, needs, and pain points of an average customer. For MSPs and other types of service providers, creating customer personas is not only an important tool for the growth of your business but also a tool for your clients and their growth.
How Do You Create a Customer Persona?
There’s one thing needed to create accurate and thorough customer personas – data. And you have plenty of it. Your CRM, POS system, website analytics, WiFi analytics, and social media pages are packed full of data that can be pulled to create realistic representations of your audience.
There are specific data sets you’ll want to outline before you start defining your ideal customer. Type of industry, job title, demographics and pain points are just a few data sets you’ll want to know about your audience. To get to what matters most to your typical client, you’ll need to research and understand behavioral data like purchase drivers, purchase barriers, motivations and communication preferences. Surveys, interviews, and market research are all helpful tools when defining personas.
Remember that personas are a broad representation, not one actual customer. It’s important to pull as much data as you can and then identify the patterns that will build your audience persona’s characteristics.
Data overload? It’s a real thing. Now it’s time to turn that data into action.
If you find you have access to a wide range of customer data points, don’t be afraid to create multiple personas. Most likely, your audience can’t be narrowed down to a single fictional representation. Depending on your business type, you could have anywhere from 3 to 20 customer personas. The point of customer personas is to offer a super granular view into your ideal customers – make sure no potential customer type goes unnoticed.
Customer Personas for Improved Sales and Marketing
Simply creating a customer persona won’t make an immediate difference in your marketing efforts – you’ll now need to reference these personas as you create content, allocate advertising budgets, and create your lead funnel.
Once you truly understand your buyer audience, do your research. Read the content they read and start to speak their language. No longer will your content be a guessing game of what your audience wants to hear. You now know what content is most desired from your audience.
Blogs, webinars, and newsletters include information that helps solve some of your customer persona’s most common pain points. These are great for attracting your ideal customer persona to your business’s website.
An ebook that guides a prospect through a complicated industry-wide pain point proves to the prospect that your company is a true authority and partner.  Even your “closer” content — case studies, sales sheets, presentations — can all be tailored to speak directly to your ideal persona.
You can make sure you’re providing the right content at the right time for the right persona by creating an audience persona matrix. Here’s an example:
Customer Personas for Increased Client Retention
When, where, and how you share your content is also an important factor to successful marketing. A customer persona can show you how your average client prefers to receive marketing content, what time they prefer to receive it, and even how often they like to receive it. This timely flow of content and follow up with potential clients can improve the nurturing process for your sales team which in the end, leads to more sales.
Once you have mastered the art of creating customer personas, service providers can add value to client relationships by providing similar data sets. By providing customers with valuable data, you will satisfy their needs for better customer understanding. Just as customer personas will improve your marketing tactics for your business, they will also improve the marketing services you perform for your clients.
By understanding the type of customer that is most valuable to your client’s business, any type of marketing strategy you perform will now have extra information to better its performance. Blog creation, social media marketing, and other types of content creation for a client will stand out even more, now that you have information on what typical customers want to see.
Data is the resource for creating a customer persona masterpiece. The more resource you have, the better the creation. If you’re interested in offering a service to your clients that pulls in more data for them, consider offering a WiFi analytics solution. GoZone’s partners have access to valuable marketing data to offer their clients – driving revenue, retention, and better relationships.
