How to Build Customer Personas for Your B2C Ecommerce Brand

Your customers are more than a contact in Salesforce. Your customer is someone who has invested in your business, and you should be investing in those relationships. So, when your ecommerce brand creates marketing collateral, shoppers shouldn’t think “Well, that’s just another marketing gimmick” but instead say “Wow, these guys seem to really know me and how I make purchases.”

This is precisely why your B2C ecommerce brand can benefit from developing a customer persona. A customer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your customer base, and therefore your target audience. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who embodies the characteristics of your best potential customers.

If you want to extend the reach of your business, customer personas are the right way to go about ensuring that your marketing efforts reach the right people at the right time and the right place.

Creating Customer Personas

Customer personas help create effective, personalized messages and compelling customer journeys. Remember, it’s the journey that is important, not necessarily the destination.

A B2C customer persona is a comprehensive representation of the type of shoppers your brand is currently reaching. The identification of a customer persona not only lets you connect with additional customers, but it will also help you identify and create collateral, so they  find you.

Let’s look at a step-by-step approach to creating customer personas for your B2C ecommerce brand.

Step 1: Identify Questions to Ask

To get started, you need to ask these questions:

Getting information: How do your shoppers consume information?

Challenges: What is preventing shoppers from finalizing a purchase?

Problem: What is the problem guiding their purchase decision and how does your product or service solve it?

Who are they and what do they like: What makes them happy and how do they finalize purchase decisions?

These data points can be synchronized for creating 360 portraits of your ideal customers; each customer segment shares psychographic, demographic, and behavioral traits.

Your primary goal is for your ecommerce brand to know its customer base inside and out. Also, your customer persona must clearly, precisely, and completely communicate to others how you can solve a problem they are facing with your product or service, how your products stand out from your competitors, and what your unique selling proposition is.

Step 2: Learn from Competition

Have a look at competitor pages and try to gather as much information as possible on the people who leave feedback, comments, and testimonials on social media pages and blogs. You can easily adopt a similar strategy by using tools like Quantcast and Similarweb to explore valuable insights into the kind of audience that is already visiting competitor stores and social media accounts.

Step 3: Demographics and Firmographics

This intricate aspect helps in transforming a profile into a person who can be trusted, a real thought leader in your industry and vertical. At the very minimum, B2C marketers should include core characteristics like location, age, and gender, along with information like education, family composition, total household income, and company type. This can help you focus your marketing efforts by gaining a complete understanding of your shoppers. Targeted content hitting specific target audiences will drive more qualified leads, resulting in more closed business.

Step 4: Reach Out to Both “High-Value” and “Unhappy” Customers

While it is beneficial toidentify your “high-value”, converting customer segments and develop personas around them, it is equally important to engage with customers who are presently unhappy with your products/services. Wondering why? Dissatisfied customers will help you pinpoint problem areas that high-value customers haven’t. Listening to all of the feedback from past shoppers gives your brand the ability to support areas that need improvement and recognize products that are creating loyal customers.

Step 5: Keep an Eye on the Goal

Creating customer personas is only helpful to your brand marketing if you are identifying goals and working towards them. Remember that you’re creating marketing collateral geared towards specific target audiences in order to relate to your shoppers. You want to serve them relevant content that shows them how your B2C ecommerce brand is exactly what they’ve been looking for.

How RafterOne Can Help

From activity on social apps to shopping on ecommerce sites, your customers are busy. In order to keep up with their expectations, brands must be everywhere, all the time, to stay connected to the user experience. Creating customer personas allows brands to identify their target audience and create personalized content directed at their specific needs. It’s crucial, in today’s online market, for retailers to be ready to deliver branded experiences across all channels.

Need help creating customer personas or developing a marketing strategy to drive leads and close deals? We’re here to help.