Does your team have a genuine and acute understanding of your customers’ needs, wants and behaviors? If you’re uncertain, optimizing personas will help ensure the success of your entire marketing program. Without personas, your messaging may not resonate with your target audience, or you might miss your audience entirely, resulting in inefficient marketing efforts.

Keep Personas Simple and Fluid

Creating personas is quick and easy, and we always prefer to keep the process simple. Marketers often become paralyzed when creating personas by overthinking them, trying to make too many or add too many details.

The number of customer personas your company needs depends on your target audience and the markets you are trying to reach. We typically recommend beginning by defining three or fewer distinct customer personas. Depending on the size and complexity of your customer base, you may find that 2 or 3 personas is sufficient for your needs. Additional personas may be defined and created as new customer segments are defined.

Remember that personas are working documents that will be updated and optimized over time. Personas may become too complex or cumbersome to use when they include too much information, or when a large quantity of customer segments are defined from the onset.

Include the Right Details

Customer personas provide a fictional representation of your ideal customer and should inspire genuine empathy for those you are trying to serve. You can gather and analyze customer data to identify patterns, interests and behaviors. This process will provide you with customer feelings, likes and dislikes, and help you imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes. Since customers make decisions emotionally, it’s important to understand how they feel and why they feel that way throughout the purchasing process.

When defining the personas for your target market, it is important to keep them focused rather than broad. Understanding specific details about your customer will help you trigger an emotional response and help you connect on a deeper level. Focusing on making stronger connections with fewer people will make your message more authentic, less generic and less boring.

Good personas should include the following details:

• Demographic details (age, gender, income, occupation)
• Geographic details (location)
• Psychographic details (beliefs, politics, religion, etc.)

Determining psychographic details is especially important. Understanding your audience’s likes and motivations will allow you to target customers accurately on social media or other channels. Defining what motivates and frustrates customers is the key to eliciting an emotional response to your creative and content. Psychographic attributes also include buying habits (such as frequency of purchase and average spend), and personal information (such as hobbies, interests and values).

Wherever possible, gather data from multiple sources and use direct customer feedback to inform your personas. This may include surveys, focus groups, sales team and customer interviews, online analytics and customer databases. Surveys or questionnaires may ask customers direct questions about their emotions; however, this may lead respondents to answer in a specific way due to the inherent bias of the format. Other sources, such as social media channels, ratings and reviews, and online community forums, are rich sources for emotional data that are often overlooked.

Customer personas should be updated regularly, as customer needs and preferences can change over time. Companies should review and refine their customer personas at least once every 6-12 months to ensure they are up-to-date and relevant.

Persona documents may be created and maintained in standard Office applications, like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. Specialized web applications – like UXPressia – may support collaboration and simplify creating customer personas.

If your company has a complex customer base and you would like some support – or a fresh, external perspective – Signal can help gather the necessary market research data and support you when creating accurate and detailed customer personas. For reference, here are some examples of a few personas Signal has created.

After you create accurate personas and share them with your team, you’ll find these foundational documents are critical to ensuring the success of your entire marketing program.

30 is a big number. It’s a daunting age with a bad reputation. So, we decided we aren’t turning 30 this year. Instead, we’re transitioning and transforming into an even better version of ourselves – Signal Version 3.0.

What is Signal 3.0? It’s the consistency and stability of three decades of work alongside innovation, creativity and a willingness to just say “yes.” Signal 3.0 lives and thrives at the juxtaposition of consistency and change.

“As much as we are proud of our history and legacy, we are even more excited to look ahead to what’s next,” Partner and VP, Account Director Jim Ellis said.

Consistency is what helps us build trust with our clients and employees. We were founded on the core values of integrity, humility, grit and hard work, and that will never change.

“The 30 years represents stability,” Partner and VP, Client Services Phil Stephens said. “It represents security that we’ve been here and we’re going to continue to be here.”

On the other hand, change is what has allowed Signal to last this long. We have always been ready to dive headfirst into new technology, whether we knew what we were diving in for or not. It’s in our DNA to eagerly take on any new projects our clients ask for. That’s how Signal has evolved, by adding new skills ahead of the curve to provide the highest quality deliverables to our clients.

“We were always willing to jump into the latest technology and do whatever we can to be a step ahead and meet the demands of a customer problem,” Partner and VP, Creative Services John Gibson said.

Consistency keeps us grounded; change drives us into the future. Signal relies on both to keep going. Our clients trust us to tackle the hard stuff because we have both the proven experience and a willingness to try new things.

“Our clients are the ones that help nudge us into things. They’ll say, ‘Hey, have you ever done this before?’ And we’ll just jump into it,” President Ricky Haynes said.

Change is not easy, and Signal has seen lots of it. But for 30 years, our Signal family of clients, employees and friends has stood by and supported us through it all, and for that we are so grateful.

Signal 3.0 isn’t slowing down. We will continue to be the strong back our clients can trust. Sure, we turned 30 today, but Signal 3.0 is tomorrow.

Situation

With over 100 years of Aviation product design and testing experience, GE’s Test Services division has developed comprehensive and flexible testing processes and skills, including planning, design, instrumentation, test execution and beyond.

However, revenue was declining, and it needed to rebuild a sales pipeline. A root cause included a lack of external awareness of GE’s test service offerings.

After an extensive competitive analysis, GE Test Services determined which service offerings were most differentiated. A market assessment provided them the knowledge of which segments and target companies to approach, through what channels and with what offerings.

Our Solution

Signal worked with GE to design a 90-day awareness program on LinkedIn and Google Ads.

The goals included:

• Increase awareness
• Gain sales intelligence by reviewing reports of who was engaging with ads the most, and what offerings were in the highest demand.
• Test the digital channels. GE Testing had never tried digital marketing, so this became their pilot program.

Signal created target audiences for the LinkedIn campaigns using an ABM model (knowing what companies to target and in what countries). We created ads using the highest potential service offerings.

For Google, Signal used persona data, a keyword starter list and competitive research to create the target key phrases and ad creative for search and remarketing ads.

We also updated the GE Aviation landing page to ensure content was engaging, digestible and tailored to the desired target audience.

Signal managed and optimized the program throughout the 90 days, meeting with GE every two weeks for lead feedback and campaign performance reporting.

Results

The campaign exceeded all industry benchmark performance metrics. GE saw a 10x increase in unique visitors to the website. What’s more, because our campaign targeted a specific audience and specific key phrases, we know this traffic was coming from the right people.

GE also gained valuable sales intelligence. Our LinkedIn campaign reporting detailed what companies, geographic locations and job titles were most engaged. Google reporting detailed what offerings were in highest demand.

At the completion of the campaign, our GE Project Lead told us, “This campaign brought us one good opportunity, which in this business can mean a lot of revenue. Product development cycles are so long that it’s hard to expect prospects to be knocking our doors down, but this campaign absolutely exceeded my expectations for awareness.”

Signal and GE are currently continuing our partnership by working on similar campaigns.

Technology and training are having a great impact on sales enablement for businesses in 2021. New sales tools in AI and automation will also enable businesses to capture consumer information and engagement activity automatically, freeing salespeople to focus more on deeper customer research, culling insights from data and creating more meaningful interactions with their buyers.

With this in mind, marketing leaders must have a direct pathway to sales management in order to stay ahead of the tools needed to continue the brand’s story and track accountability and conversions.

According to Forrester, 40% of B2B sales representatives plan to modify their tactics to better fit remote sales, looking for more dynamic ways to earn buyer’s attention than the traditional email, phone calls, and screen-sharing interactions. Additionally, since buyers are increasingly comfortable with e-commerce, marketers are adding more value and functionality to their platforms.

Three trends that will make all the difference:

In closing

There are big changes on the horizon as 2021 brings continued COVID challenges for marketers and the companies they serve. From a sharp increase in the work-from-home workforce, to a renewed commitment to “digital first” and an excellent customer experience, teams will be forced to be innovative and inventive with almost everything they do. Lean, agile, flexible and reliable partners who can complement internal teams are becoming a necessity, not a luxury.

Check out the first three installments of our CMO Intelligence series:

• Empathy, Trust and the Customer Experience
• Reimagining the Marketing Team
• Your Digital Presence is Top Priority