Understanding Client Persona from The Perspective of Execution

You must be familiar, if not too familiar, with client/buyer personas. More or less, all companies use buyer personas. And for good reasons too:

• Websites tend to be 2-5 times more user-friendly and effective when built to customer persona specs.
  
• Using personas in email campaigns led to a two-fold improvement in the open rate and a five-fold improvement in the click-through rate.
  
• 56% of companies generated better-quality leads using personas.
  
• 93% of companies that top their own lead and revenue generation goals perform a persona-based segmentation on their database. 

If you’re pushing lukewarm leads into the pipeline and seeing poor sales, you might just be targeting the wrong people. As Seth Godin says, “People don’t show up when you launch. They show up when they’re ready.”

Your marketing campaigns may be flawless on their own, but if they’re not reaching the right people, they’re useless. This is so obvious that people tend to miss it. Let’s not presume that you couldn’t be guilty of the same. 

Make no mistake, it’s not that you don’t know your audience well enough. In our experience, we’ve never met a client who didn’t know their target audience; they must know, and it shows during conversations. The issue most often is putting it on paper in the form of a solid, go-to framework. 

The key is asking the right questions and taking it from there. What kind of questions should you ask? These, to start with, and then we’ll move on to best practices as well:

• What keeps them up at night?
  
• Who makes the buying decisions?
  
• Where do they get their news from?
  
• Are they tech-savvy or technophobic?
  
• How do they define success?
  
• Get personal (but not creepy!)
  
• 7 best practices for creating client personas

What keeps them up at night?

Understanding their primary challenges, whether it’s reducing operational costs, increasing market share, or improving customer satisfaction, allows you to tailor your solutions to address these pain points directly. 

Now, this alignment will ensure that your marketing efforts resonate on a deeper level, ultimately driving better results. 

A Chief Marketing Officer might express that their biggest worry is staying ahead of competitors in a saturated market. So, you can propose marketing strategies that emphasize differentiation and competitive analysis. 

Let’s consider Clara, a CMO, and here is what her persona might look like. 

Who makes the buying decisions?

Is purchasing authority handled by one person or shared by a team? Knowing this lets you adjust your message to target the stakeholders who control the budget. 
For example, in a B2B environment, if both the CFO and CTO are involved in the decision, you can create messaging that highlights financial returns and technological advancements. Consider the template below. 

Where do they get their news from? 

Whether it’s through LinkedIn, industry blogs, or trade publications, knowing where they spend their time online helps you optimize your content distribution strategy to maximize reach and engagement.

For example, if your target audience relies on LinkedIn for professional insights, focusing your content marketing efforts on this platform could significantly increase your visibility and lead generation.

Here’s what to consider while researching the sources of Clara’s daily information. 

Are they tech-savvy or technophobic?

Are they early adopters or do they prefer tried-and-tested methods?

Understanding this will guide how you present your solutions—whether you should emphasize cutting-edge innovation or the reliability of proven methods. 

For a client who is wary of complex tech solutions, you might highlight the simplicity and ease of integration of your software, using testimonials and case studies that demonstrate how similar companies have successfully adopted it. 

As far as Clara is concerned, here’s how she stacks up in this regard. 

How do they define success?

Is it by increased sales, enhanced brand awareness, or improved customer retention? Aligning your objectives with their KPIs ensures that your strategies contribute to the metrics that matter most to them.

If your client values customer satisfaction over raw sales, emphasizing your solution’s impact on improving Net Promoter Scores (NPS) could be more compelling than focusing solely on revenue growth. 

But how does Clara view success? Something in the following manner. 

Get personal (but not creepy!)

Ask about their work environment, daily routines, and even industry gripe.  

These details can unlock hidden gems that inform your approach. Clara for one is quite fascinating in this regard. 

So those were just a few examples of how you can create a client persona. You can build intelligent data sheets around each question, or extrapolate key insights from each question and add them to a single, but dynamic client persona. Now, let’s see some best practices for creating personas.

7 best practices for creating client personas

Consider the following five best practices while creating personas:

1. Identify your goals: Your personas will be created based on your goals. So ask yourself, What exactly do you need to know about your customer? How will you use the persona? Who will be using it?
2. Create a research roster: Identify the right mix of research methods. Do you prefer interviews over surveys? Social listening over signup forms? Feedback? Focus groups?How long should the first level of research take? Should you bring on a professional research analyst?
3. Prepare a questionnaire: Involve all the key stakeholders while drawing up the questionnaire. Don’t bother too much about relevance from the get-go. Feel free to add informal questions, too. In time, after multiple interactions, the document can be combed into shape. 
4. Keep the persona evolving: The persona should evolve along with the person. It’s not a one-time thing. There are no final drafts here.
5. Simplify where you can: If you see sufficient similarities between two or more personas, combine them into one segment.
6. Bring a writer/editor onboard: Documentation can make or break the entire process. Good documentation is not everyone’s cup of tea. So, consider adding a writer/editor to your team. And no, even AI can’t help you here because AI tools work best when handled by specialists. So a CMO, unless they’re a writer, couldn’t milk generative AI the way a professional writer can.
7. Take help of tools: Try buyer persona tools like Make my Persona by HubSpot, SEMrush Persona, Venngage, Xtensio, etc.

All these best practices can be summed up in a single word: Listening. The more you listen to your audience, the better. As Adele Revella, author of Buyer Personas, says, “Listening is an essential part of any first meeting. It’s how professionals learn about their customers’ concerns, goals, and expectations so that they can present a relevant solution.”

From persona to the person

Remember, developing a client persona is not a one-time task but an ongoing process. As markets evolve and client needs shift, so too should your understanding and approach. Continuously engage with your clients, refine your personas, and adjust your strategies accordingly. True marketing magic happens when you know your clients not just as data points but as real people with unique challenges and aspirations.

Catch our post on Paid Ads 2.0: Why Continuous Innovation and Client Collaboration Are Game-Changers