StratAgree™ – Personas
Bring customers into your decision making process, with Personas
A fantastic way to inject more customer insight into your marketing and product development work is to develop and use personas. A persona is a representative of a group of your customers to which you give a name, a face and characteristics of that group.
With strategic segmentation we lead organizations through the process of determining a reasonable number of customer segments that most represent their customers. With those segments determined, we are able to develop profiles using real, representative information. When the profiles have sufficient information about their customer segment, your team will begin to perceive them as real people. So real in fact, that we give each profile a proper name. The result is a persona, or representative customer, for each of the segments. Examples of the profile elements found in a persona might include:
StratAgree™ Persona
- Name
- Representative photo
- Address
- Age
- Home branch
- Income and Assets
- Financial needs profile
- Concerns
- Goals
- Current product ownership
- Next-likely product (and other potential product opportunities)
- Family stage (single, married, kids at home, empty nest, etc.)
- Financial Sophistication
- Information sources
- Leisure activities
- Automobiles
- Internet and mobile device usage
We find that bringing customers into your organization is an excellent way to sharpen your focus. Personas allow you to do just that–to have customers in the room during critical discussions to help you and your team make better decisions. Uses for your personas are limited only by your imagination.
We’ve seen organizations actually invite personas into staff and company meetings. One such meeting was held to plan marketing activities aimed at growing deposit balances. Josie, a representative of the retired depositor customer group, dropped by with a large plate of homemade cookies! Josie joined the marketing team at the conference table (that is… a life-size cutout of her did) and helped keep the team focused on the attributes and needs of the segment she represents.
As time goes on, your team members will bond with your customer personas and, by extension, your real customers. Although personas are fictional representations of customers, they help your team to know and understand the real individuals in particular customer segments and will become integral to your ideation and planning.
Let us help you accelerate your journey to customer centricity with personas.
To learn more, contact Robert Dorn at 404-987-2419.