Our Customer Persona Development Service

The most powerful way to reach your customers is when you Market to Their MotivationSM utilizing customer personas. Through our proprietary persona development process, we bring your customer's voice to life. Using personas, your team can create marketing that speaks more directly to each customer's needs.

Our persona creation service is designed to deliver uniquely tailored customer personas that can be used in all your marketing, including marketing automation and website personalization strategies. We give you everything you need to target your marketing more accurately.

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Let's take a look at the Market to Their Motivation persona development process.

 

The Different Types of Personas

First off, you're going to require different types of personas depending on the nature of your business and the way you want to use them.

For example, it's important to determine first and foremost what is the primary goal for your personas. A common misunderstanding is assuming that a marketing (or buyer) persona is the same as a usability (UX) persona.

UX, or design, personas are used when building or improving an application that the user can easily relate to and will want to use. This could be your eCommerce website, your SaaS product or mobile app. The focus when creating UX personas usually centers around completing tasks or goals, like getting through the checkout process as quickly and easily as possible.

On the other hand, when you're designing a marketing persona, you focus instead on understanding buying motivations, which features of an already-existing product will appeal most to your customer, and how your products and your business as a whole meets your customers' needs.

 

Let's focus a bit more on marketing personas.

If you're a B2B business, persona development will naturally focus on different elements than a B2C business.

When you're creating a B2B marketing persona, for example, you are often dealing with multiple decision makers. And some of the biggest issues to explore are the challenges and pain points they're facing on the job.

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What's their role in the company, and what are they trying to accomplish?

What do they need to achieve their goals, and what obstacles are they facing?

What might keep them from purchasing your product or service?

What might turn them toward a competitor instead?

What does success look like from your user's point of view, and how does your product or service help them get there?

 

Marketing to a B2C customer, while it has some overlap, focuses much more on more personal components.

You want to know what a day in your user's life looks like, as well as what their habits and personality are like.

Understanding (and marketing to) their hopes and dreams is key in B2C persona creation, as is diving into their fears and worries.

Show how your product or service alleviates those worries.

Regardless of whether we are doing marketing personas or ones for UX, B2B or B2C, the key is focusing on what motivates them, inspires them and best meets their needs.

We do this by combining intense data research with psychological and emotional value insights.

 

The Motivation Rocket FrameworkSM: A Focus on Customer Values

Founded upon a data-based, psychological approach called Spiral Dynamics, our persona creation process seeks to understand the values and systems of thinking held by your customers, whether they be individuals or businesses. Our unique focus allows for easy segmenting of your customer base, dedicated personalization, and a clear understanding of how to reach different types of customers.

Our Motivation Rocket Framework is used to explore:

  • how your customers respond to the world around them in given circumstances.
  • how customers think about your products and services. For example, is their thinking binary ("if it’s not black, then it must be white"), or do they seem comfortable with uncertainty? Do they welcome and want lots of detailed information, or simply "just the facts"?

 

Motivation Rocket Framework for Persona Creation

There are five major customer values that can affect how they perceive your business and your products. 

Speed.

These customers demand respect, becoming impatient when they don't get what they want. While they're loyal to friends, they tend to view the world as a jungle with survival of the fittest ruling the day.

Structure.

Customers who value structure are intensely loyal, with a deep respect for rules, discipline, and deadlines. They believe in effort and commitment as a way to bring about order, and they always play fairly.

Results.

With a focus on success, these goal-driven customers prize ambition and are always looking to see how a deal benefits them. They face challenges squarely, and they demand to be taken seriously.

Community.

Teamwork is the driving force behind these customers, who view all people as equals and stand up for the underdog. Money and status are simply not high priorities for these customers who value openness and community spirit.

Meaning.

These customers engage with things that they find interesting, including ideas, theories and knowledge in general. They have a long-term view, which drives their decision-making process, and they see the world as a fascinating puzzle.

Our Persona Development Process

We've developed a uniquely focused persona creation service at Polished Geek. We call it Marketing to Their MotivationSM.

Through it, we harness psychological and emotional truths using the five core customer values described above. Then combine those insights with realistic personas developed through careful analysis of data.

 

Persona Creation Process - Discovery Workshop

Discovery Workshop

During this initial phase, we meet with you to review the existing personas you may be using. We want to understand how you're segmenting your market and what your goals are.

Then we look at your company's values, comparing them to the core values of your customers.

 

Persona Creation Process - Research

The Research Phase

This is the data-crunching phase of our work.

We review the behavior patterns of your customers, we scope out how your competitors are positioning themselves — basically, we gather and analyze any and all quantitative data that we can get our hands on.

 

Persona Creation Process - Interviews

Interviews & Insight

Quantitative research is crucial, but qualitative information provides incredibly valuable insight into your customers.

That's why we interview your recent customers and customers whom you haven't seen in a while.

We also talk to your internal sales and marketing folks to understand their intentions as they craft marketing strategy.

Our goal here is to understand just how well your customers' values pair with the messages they're getting from your brand.

 

Persona Creation Process - Profile Development

Creating Your Persona Profile

Next, we merge all our conclusions and findings into a set of distinct personas.

Each marketing persona we create is unique and based on solid data from your business, combined with the psychological and emotional values of your customers.

This gives you better insight into your ideal customer's shopping behavior and buying decisions.

 

Persona Creation Process - Roadmap

The Persona Roadmap

Creating your personas isn't the end of the road — In fact, it's just the beginning.

Maybe you've dealt with other agencies before that handed you some persona information and left you on your own to figure out how to use it.

We don't leave you hanging. Instead, in addition to receiving your unique personas, we also give you a roadmap on how to use them in your marketing.

We target three to five critical changes needed in your website and marketing strategy based on the discoveries made during the persona development process.

And if you want to talk about how to incorporate this new knowledge into better marketing automation or website personalization, we're happy to give you some fresh ideas on those as well.

Persona-centered marketing campaigns drive revenue.

With your customer personas in hand, you're well-positioned to start planning a conversion-driven strategy.

Because you understand your customers so well, you can explain exactly why your product or service is of value to them and why they should choose it over your competitors' products, in a way that will truly reach them.

You can select the right testimonials that will resonate with your persona's core values.

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Different types of customers also present different barriers to engagement and conversion. By understanding how to appeal to each persona, you can start the process of breaking down those barriers and creating a real relationship.

By taking their psychological and emotional values into consideration in building your personas, you'll finally be able to pinpoint how to trigger a buying decision, and win their business.

Personas are genuinely the heart of your marketing, helping keep your message on target and building customer connections.

Ready to Rocket Ahead of your Competition?

Effective customer personas blend real data with a deep empathy with the core values of your ideal customer.

Our proprietary Market to Their MotivationSM persona creation service gives your marketing the clarity you need, plus a roadmap of how you can immediately begin putting your personas into action.

Contact us and let's chat about our Persona Creation service can make a powerful difference in your business.

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