There are four key steps to developing actionable customer personas. Integrating these steps will help you develop a clearer picture of who your key customers are and what best motivates them in the brand selection and the buying process. This in turn will bring clarity and focus to where your organization should best invest time, talent and money to best meet the customer’s needs and thus maximize the impact to the business.
In fourth installment, we discussed how to develop customer personas from the insights gleaned from the data collection. In this installment, we will discuss the fourth step in developing actionable customer personas, pulling the learning’s through to your marketing plans and communication strategies.
Step Four: Pulling It Through
Now that all the relevant customer personas are developed, they should be used to inform the marketing plan and the marketing and sales communications strategies that will be most effective. The more motivating and targeted messaging should also come out of the persona findings.
Communications Channels: Personas can reveal:
- The format customers prefer getting information
- Media that is consumed which should direct media plans
- Social media channel preferences
- Key influencers
Crafting the Message: Once you have identified the target customer segment, the communications strategy can be aligned to create messaging, content, and campaigns that resonate. The persona should reveal what customers want to hear.
- Are they budget constrained or is price a huge issue
- Helping them solve their pain points
- Integrating their key interests and motivators into the content
- Addressing their barriers to purchase
- Addressing their dreams and expectations
- Appealing to their core values
- Addressing their fears, etc.
In summary, customer personas go beyond generalized profiles developed in segmentation studies and will better connect the product or service to the customer, and thus better solve their problems. This creates a win-win for the brand and the customer. Be sure to include the right people on the core team in the development of the personas. This ensures that you have buy-in from key stake-holders as well as including the different perspectives needed to construct the best customer personas. Ensure that the development process is data driven and not based on gut instincts alone or limited data. In order for customer personas to be actionable they must be based on analysis and research on real customers. Then once the personas are developed, act on them by using specific messaging, communication channels and promotions that correspond to the insights from the personas. This will ensure that the brand’s impact can be maximized throughout the customer journey.
Although this article was written with the Healthcare Industry in mind, these steps are industry agnostic and can be applied across industries.
About the author: RD Shanklin & Associates is a healthcare & life sciences marketing strategy consultancy focused on driving profitable growth through enhancing customer insights, strategic & tactical planning, marketing and commercial strategy.
Regina Shanklin is the founder and principal consultant for the organization. She is a marketing executive with over 20 years of delivering business results while generating strong return-on-investment (ROI). Regina has a diverse marketing background and has driven results in the Healthcare, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) and Advertising industries.
