Customer Personas: The Importance of Knowing Your Audience

Understanding who it is you’re marketing to can help you deliver the right messages to potential clients. This is why you should be investing time into developing your customer personas.

Building customer personas is an effective way of reaching your audience on a more personal level, developing a rapport and ultimately increasing the likelihood of conversions.

Getting to know your audience

The best place to start when thinking about customer personas is with your existing audience. You’ll want to find out who they are, as well as their motivations and goals. It can also be useful to consider any hesitations that are preventing them from going forward with a claim.

Some of the data points you should bear in mind while carrying out your audience research include:

• Age
• Career or industry
• Education levels
• Location
• Hobbies and interests
• Household income
• Sex or gender

There are many useful online tools you can use to research your audience – but Google Analytics is a good starting point. Although Google Analytics data isn’t always 100% accurate, it will give you a good overview of who is visiting your website.

Under the Audience tab, you’ll be able to view visitors’ age, gender, location and more. All of this is valuable information that will contribute towards the personas you build.

Identifying your audience’s wants and pain points

Another great way to find out more about your audience is by involving your customer-facing teams.

Your customer-facing staff members will be able to tell you the outcomes people are looking for when they get in touch. And they will also provide a better idea of the obstacles that are preventing people from starting a claim.

This will help you to define what helpful content looks like for your audience, enabling you to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Building customer personas that characterise your audience

After you’ve compiled information about your audience, the next step is to find common characteristics. This should help you to narrow down your audience to a few groups that will become the basis for your customer personas.

For each of these groups, create a persona that reflects their attributes. You can give the persona a name, income level and any other relevant characteristics. Your goal should be to provide enough detail for you to relate to each persona as a potential client.

Using customer personas to create targeted content

For your customer personas to be successful, it’s essential that you incorporate what you have learnt from your research into your content strategy.

Think about any pain points that came up while you were developing each persona. You may be able to address these within your content. For example, if the worry of legal costs was a recurring issue, you could provide reassurance by explaining your pricing options or No Win No Fee agreements.

By doing this effectively, you could create more conversions in less time as you’ll be alleviating the concerns that could prevent someone from getting in touch. This is particularly important in the legal sector as starting a claim can feel intimidating for people who haven’t used a solicitor before.

So, if you aren’t already, consider putting together some customer personas with your team. You might learn something new about your target audience that will help you in the long run.

To benefit from the customer research First4Lawyers carries out, just get in touch.