Understanding Your Audience Better: Customer Personas

In a business - any business - it is crucial to know and more importantly understand your customers.

Blogging is no different!

The only difference: You think of your customers as your readers. And the ultimate goal might not be a sale but them sharing your content on social media or otherwise giving you feedback and interacting.

When writing about a certain topic, you need to be thinking about your readers and all their needs and frustrations. Are you creating value? Are you helping them with their issues and questions?

The easiest and most effective way to do so is through so-called Customer Personas or Buyer Personas.

What is a Customer Persona?

A Customer Persona (or Buyer Persona) is defined as a "semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customer" (Hubspot, 2019).

You try to get a detailed picture of their interests and their motivation, their frustrations as well as certain character traits that in turn help you understand them better (Gilliland, 2017).

Why do I need a Customer Persona?

As I have already mentioned: To understand your customer better and in turn achieve your goals. Plain and simple.

Once you have established all the wants and needs and created a persona, you can better adapt all aspects of your website to this exact person. This might range from small layout changes to entire articles that focus on a sepcific topic of interest to your readers.

By humanising your ideal reader, you will be able to empathise with them and connect to them on another level. By connection a sense of trust is established, which ultimately leads to a sale or to somebody sharing your content (Khudeira, 2017).

Again, thank you so much for reading, leave me your thoughts in the comments.

See you next week!

References

Gilliland, N. (2017) ‘What are customer personas and why are they so important?’ [Online]. Available at: https://econsultancy.com/customer-personas/ (Accessed 23 November 2019)

HubSpot (2019) ‚What Is a Buyer Persona?‘ [Online]. Available at: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona (Accessed 23 November 2019)

Khudeira, S. (2017) ‘What Are Buyer Personas and Why They Are Important to Your Website’ [Online]. Available at: https://www.intechnic.com/blog/what-are-buyer-personas-and-why-they-are-important-to-your-website/ (Accessed 23 November 2019)