Thinking about your customers’ experience with your brand is vital to your success. It’s important to establish a good relationship with them - after all they are the ones who will make or break your brand. Do you know that your business is not what you think it is, it is what your customers believe it is? In the era of social media and online reviews, they are the ones who will create your business image. Maintaining a positive relationship with customers can only help improve your brand’s image and most certainly drive more revenue. Just look at companies that take their relationships with clients to the ultimate level like Amazon, Nordstrom, and Zappos, or the local Summit County company Vida-flo, that in a moment of discomfort will always make you feel better in a very personal and empathetic way. With that in mind, Imagine That believes we can all use personas to improve relationships with our customers to grow your company. In the following paragraphs we will explain what a persona is, and most importantly, how to use them to benefit your company.
WHAT IS A PERSONA?
A Persona is a tool used by companies to better understand the customers of it’s products or services. To create a persona, it’s best to deeply understand who your client is, how they behave, and what they expect from your brand. Consider a persona a ‘pretend’ extreme customer, and if you manage to please this extreme client, any other customer will be pleased as well. A brand can have as many personas as necessary. Having a couple of distinct personas can help you achieve a larger audience.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO BUILD A PERSONA?
You should consider your persona in every touch-point you have with your clients. Doing so will help your brand to develop a consistent image, improving your relationship with your clients. Tom Fellner, Imagine That’s CEO, believes that a persona helps you establish your brand’s personality, and this personality can be communicated in all aspects of the brand, and in every single interaction with consumers. “Here at Imagine That we use it all the time. For example, the brand archetypes we created for Friends of the Dillon Ranger District guided us fully when we were building their website, and it really shows in the look and feel.”
HOW DO I BUILD A PERSONA?
A persona can represent an extreme client archetype or a fictional “typical” customer. The first thing to do is to develop this ‘pretend’ client’s profile, and we set up a template to help you with that. I suggest you gather your team and work on it together, as working with other people will only make the results richer. With your team, fill up the template by using information from different sources, such as the user data from your website analytics and interviews with a few customers. This will help deepen your understanding of their perception of your brand, and what they expect from you. Getting information from different sources will help you achieve a fuller, more accurate result.
YAY! YOU HAVE A PERSONA! NOW WHAT?
Now it’s time to rethink all your customer touch-points like your website, social media pages, customer service scripts, and all other moments the client is in direct contact with your brand. Do your touch-points translate to what your persona is expecting from you? Would this persona be satisfied with the communication you provided? How can you improve this persona’s experience when they interact with your brand? Thinking about these details and making appropriate changes in your business, improves your relationship with your clients and consequently your brand’s image.
NEED HELP? AND WE WILL BE HAPPY TO HELP YOU BUILD YOUR PERSONAS, AND REVIEW YOUR CUSTOMER BRAND EXPERIENCE.
