Customer Personas
Applying an understanding the Five Factor Model can help when learning how to create customer personas for use in copywriting. As part of a digital strategy roadmap, customer personas can help a business tailor content messaging so that it engages more effectively with their target audience. Understanding the wants and needs of customers can also help a business develop products and services aligned with their preferences, which can generate more leads and sales.
What Is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona, also called a marketing persona or buyer persona, is a fictional character with characteristics representative of the target audience that a business wants to reach. They can play a useful role within the art of storytelling, increasing the effectiveness of content used to promote products and services. The process of customer journey mapping can also be informed by an understanding of how different personality types might respond at each of the customer journey stages in a content marketing funnel.
Customer Personas and Digital Marketing
The quality of content that potential customers encounter when they interact with a business online can impact their buying decisions. Copywriting that reflects an understanding of customer needs and effectively communicates relevant details can instil confidence in a product or service. A technology copywriter can use their technical knowledge to explain complex subject matter in clear, easy to understand terms, while highlighting key benefits and calls to action. They could also place testimonials from satisfied clients alongside relevant content, in the form of snippets with links to the full testimonials. The fresh perspective a copywriter provides could boost the effectiveness of both existing and new content.
Applying an awareness of psychology to the sales process, enable a copywriter to craft content that is more likely to appeal to particular customer preferences. For example, The Five Factor Model can be used to build customer personas. An understanding of digital marketing can deliver content that is more likely to attract a target audience, promote a brand and generate leads and sales. When applied to landing pages, articles, blog posts, email sales funnels, email newsletters, case studies, white papers, eCommerce product descriptions and eBooks, this strategy can help a business to stand out from their competitors.
The Five Factor Model
The Big Five Personality Traits Test provides a psychological framework, awareness of which can lead to a deeper understanding of human behaviour and preferences. Within a digital marketing strategy, the Five Factor Model (FFM) can improve the effectiveness of content types such as; website landing pages, articles and blog posts, eBooks, email newsletters, email sales funnels, case studies and white papers. When applied to technology copywriting, the FFM enables the creation of content that resonates more deeply with traits of the target audience, which can increase engagement and generate more sales.
The use of storytelling techniques in content creation can make it more likely to appeal to an audience. An understanding of The Five Factor Model and the influence on human behaviour of the traits of openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism can assist in the process of creating the different customer persona types.
How To Create Customer Personas
Realistic characters with back stories make more effective marketing personas than superficial characters lacking depth. However, creating accurate customer personas for use within content marketing requires sufficient data. This could be collected using customer surveys. You could also use The Five Factor Model to create fictional characters. For example, by answering The Big Five Personality Traits Test questions as they might be answered by fictional, famous or historic characters, who possess qualities similar to those of the target audience. This could assist in the process of creating customer personas. The results could be combined with demographic data and buying habits, to create stories about a product or service that are more likely to resonate with customers.
Well written characters will exhibit qualities that cause an audience to relate to them and care about what happens to them. For an author they can form the centre around which their story will be built. For a business, relatable characters can humanise what might otherwise be an uninspiring brand. Through what they say and do, characters can appeal to a particular target audience and reflect themes, values and ideas that a business wants to associate with itself and the products or services that it sells. An organisation can tell stories featuring characters that embody the message they are attempting to promote.
Characters can reveal hidden traits indirectly through their behaviour, rather than stating them. Developing marketing personas with strengths and weaknesses that will appear within content fully formed and with depth is difficult. Using The Five Factor Model dominant traits could be established for each character in a story, so that they exhibit behaviour reflecting their preferences, sense of self and perception of other people and the world. Within the narrative used to promote a product or service, realistic marketing personas could resonate deeply with an audience and might even attract a following.
Collecting Customer Persona Data
Customer persona questions to ask in surveys, tests or quizzes should gauge where an individual falls on a scale from high to low for each trait. Rather than ask people directly, this can be done using questions that allow them to choose from a range of options how they would behave in particular situations. For example, this free big five personality test consists of sixty multiple choice questions, twelve for each of the five personality traits. Incentives, such as access to exclusive downloadable content, could be used to encourage people to complete a test, quiz or survey to carry out persona creation for marketing. Data collected could be used to create customer personas, or profiles, with each customer placed into one of five customer persona groups:
High Openness: Innovators are excited by innovative products and services, that enable them to experience something new.
High Conscientiousness: Data-driven planners respond to detailed reports and case studies, which provide them with verified facts.
High Agreeableness: Community builders respect ethical community values and look for products and services that benefit society.
High Extraversion: Engaged socialisers enjoy live online or real world events, engagement and interaction with a business.
High Neuroticism: Cautious decision-makers look for support, reassurance and low risk solutions to their problems.
Although individuals are a complex mix of the five personality traits, they typically have dominant traits. Different versions of content marketing messaging could be written, each of which is more likely to appeal to people who have specific dominant traits. For example, while customers high in conscientiousness are sent email newsletters containing research backed data, people high in agreeability could receive newsletters that highlight human interest stories and those who are high in openness would receive stories that feature innovative technology.