PERSONA GRATA

Customer profiles, buyer personas — how many of these do you formally create and informally contemplate for a marketing or product campaign? As marketers, we are always modeling to “keep it real” when we talk about a product to a target audience or develop a new product.

Increase understanding
Interviews and other research of your past customers and reviewing customer profile data help you develop personas on your current products. The interviews give you an opportunity to get a deeper understanding of your buyers’ motivations to help you model your next customer targets.

And a extra benefit: Interviews can give you new product ideas and product improvement perspectives. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions, you may find the answers you are looking for to fix or improve a product.

Here’s a whitepaper from IBM that provides a clean process to remind us of persona development best practices and a great primer if you are just starting to use personas.

Read more here.