3 Ways to Use Customer Personas to Drive Engagement

As your brand grows, you’ll soon find it difficult to create content that is engaging and relevant for everyone.

The good news is that this is not a new problem for digital marketers. The even better news is that there is a solution, and that’s customer personas.

In this post, we’ll introduce customer personas. This will include a look at how you can begin to create your own. We’ll then share three ways you can use customer personas to drive engagement.

Let’s dive in!

What Are Customer Personas?

While your audience may consist of tens of thousands – or even hundreds of thousands – of individuals, there exists subsets within your customer base who share similar goals, needs, desires, and values.

These are known as customer personas.

A customer persona enables you to group these similar individuals together so you can be smarter about your digital marketing efforts.

So how would you go about creating customer personas?

You’ll first need access to customer demographics. Google Analytics, for example, provides you with information such as age, gender, socioeconomic class, and interests.

From there, you can decide how you’d like to group – and eventually market to – your customers.

This will differ for every business, but here are a few ways to do it:

• By age: If you have customers spread across multiple generations, then starting with personas separated by age may be the most meaningful.
• By interest: If your customers tend to fall within a narrower age range, then you may want to segment by interest instead. An example of this may be an athlesiure company creating personas for 1) daily grinders, 2) weekend warriors, and 3) fashionistas.
• By brand affinities: If your brand is fairly new, you can create personas based on what other brands your customers interact with and purchase from. By knowing which brands they follow, it will also help you to know what types of content they like.

There’s seemingly limitless ways for creating customer personas. Have fun and get creative.

How to Use Customer Personas to Drive Engagement

1. Segment Your Email Lists

If you could do one thing that guarantees your emails to get more opens, more clicks, and overall greater engagement, wouldn’t you do it?

With segmentation, you can!

Customer personas enable you to segment your email lists so that your subscribers get content tailored to their needs. When done correctly, you can expect upwards of 14% more opens and 100% higher clicks!

Think of each persona as its own segment. Then build email content that speaks to that persona and that persona only.

While this does mean more content (though many elements can be used interchangeably), the results are often worth the effort.

2. Go Where Your Customers Are

How can you advertise to or engage with a customer if you’re in a place where they’re unlikely to be? The fact is, you can’t.

So it’s important that you know where your customers are, and then use that to your advantage.

Here’s what I mean:

Customer Persona 1 is a Gen Z’er who loves video games and staying connected with her friends. You’re unlikely to find her on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter, but she may be spending a good deal of her time on Instagram and YouTube. Heck, even more non-traditional social media platforms like Twitch are a great place to consider.

3. Personalize Your Campaigns

Personalization, like segmentation, is an easy and effective way to connect with your customers.

What does personalization look like?

Perhaps the most basic example is found in email marketing. The majority of email marketing platforms will enable you to add subscriber information, like name or location, to your emails. This creates a more authentic experience for your subscribers.

Email marketing is not the only place you can personalize, though.

Let’s say you are running digital ads via Google. You are targeting customers in three main locations – Boston, MA, New York City, NY, and Los Angeles, CA.

To make the ads more personal, you can use responsive ads which will change the ad copy dependent on user location. This makes the ad more relevant and, therefore, more likely to connect with your consumer.

In what ways have you segmented your audience to create customer personas for your brand? Let us know in the comments below.