Is It Time to Refresh Your Customer Personas?

Technological innovation is changing the way we live our daily lives, transforming the digital landscape at an exponential rate. While it, and the wider world continues to evolve, consumer needs and intent evolve in sync.

Companies regularly evolve and update their services and product offering to keep up with the times, but how often do they refresh their customer personas?

Customer Personas

As we recently explored, defining a target audience is the first and most essential step towards success for any company or business. It can enable small businesses to effectively compete with large companies by targeting their niche market; no one can afford to target everyone.

Personas are profiles of your target audience that would make ideal customers. A persona typically involves much deeper and more detailed research than the target audience since it hoans in on specific characteristics and interests of your target audience. Once these personas are defined, most companies will use them as part of their sales process in order to target the people most likely to buy their products or services.

However, too often companies evolve their offering and neglect to update who they’re targeting. Products change, buyers change, the marketplace changes, competitors provide compelling alternatives and businesses learn more about their customers. All of these conspire to render yesterday’s persona documents less useful – sometimes they become downright irrelevant.

Developing personas are not a task to be done once, then filed away. They should be kept as true reflections of how a business is developing. By giving your current buyer personas a refresh, you can better define your strategies, develop informed lead nurturing programs, improve your conversion rate and improve revenue performance.

Updating Your Personas

Effective persona development allows you to leverage existing client and buyer personas as well as develop new leads. If you have not performed a persona restoration in recent memory, you’d better get started.

According to a Nielsen Norman Group survey, only 28% of organisations regularly update their customer personas (quarterly or more frequently). But, those who do report a very positive impact on user experience. Nearly half of organisations (46%) update their personas every 1-4 years and the remaining 26% make revisions after 5 years or not at all. As expected, teams who do not revise their personas for 5+ years are typically less satisfied with how successful their customer personas are in creating a better user experience.

Our recent blog post on key audiences details how to form customer personas, but one great way of keeping your personas fresh and up-to-date, is speaking to your customers. By speaking to the people who have recently bought from you, you can understand their problems, how your products or services helped overcome them and even find ways of further improving your service. 

How We Can Help

To remain effective, customer personas should be ‘living’ documents, updated to account for changes in your business or the things you learn as it evolves. If you’ve noticed a drop in traffic or conversions, you may be targeting the wrong audience and thus, need to check whether your personas are up-to-date.

Acuant’s global marketing solutions enable businesses to truly understand their customers and their customers’ unique characteristics. Our engine analyses all available data points from a customer’s digital footprint which can be utilised to accurately and effectively personalise your marketing efforts.

With Acuant Identity’s Alternative and Social Data, you have real-time, meaningful insights at your fingertips and can tailor your marketing to ensure that everything your consumers see is relevant, based on life events, interests and hobbies, when and where they go on holiday, their personality and when they’re online.

All this and more enables you to truly tailor your marketing to enhance engagement retention cross-sell and upsell personalise your user experience with profile personalisation.

Book a demo today and see for yourself how powerful our suite of marketing personalisation solutions are.