Creating Personas for Business Strategy

The motivation behind developing a business strategy is defining the organization's overall goal and creating an execution plan accordingly.

For most businesses, being customer-centric is one of the key elements to become more profitable.

Personas are an excellent tool to achieve customer-centricity and play a significant role in the business strategy development process. The executive level is often far away from the actual customers. The created buyer personas will provide an in-depth understanding of the client base to make the right strategic decisions.

Nailing down the Brand Personality

However, along with creating data-driven personas you should nail down your brand personality. The Brand personality describes human characteristics reflected by a brand. A brand with consistent traits valued by the consumer segments enhances its brand perception tremendously. This personality is a qualitative value added to a brand in addition to its functional benefits. A brand personality is something with which the consumer can identify. Especially the bigger the corporation, the more critical a consistent brand personality becomes because it helps employees to understand the company's environment faster no matter in which department or region they work.

Defining the brand personality before adapting or changing the business strategy is vital because it will allow the company to evaluate whether the planned changes are in sync with the brand personality.

However, defining the brand personality alone is not enough. The creation of data-driven personas at the same time is essential to achieve the customer-centricity every organization is striving for. For instance, after you have created the personas, you might realize that your brand personality does not match most customer segments, which will require fundamental changes in business strategy. The better brand and customer personality are aligned, the more loyal the customers will be.

Let us look closely at how personas can help the different business strategy steps.

Review of Status Quo

To know where you want to go, you need to know where you are. Gather as much information from the different departments to paint a clear picture of where the company stands.

Creating personas by analyzing customer reviews, surveys, social media, analytics, and so on will turn the data into actionable insights about your customers and help you understand where the company stands. Acknowledging the pain points, emotions, Go-tos, and interests of the current customers uncover areas within the business that need attention. Additionally, creating competitor personas will help set goals for the sales, marketing, and product development team in the future.

Creating the vision statement

After you understand the status quo, it is time to create a vision statement. Being customer-centric means building the strategy and every department involved around the customers. The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be to define the vision and steer the entire team towards it. When you see the personas in front of you, it will be much easier to define a strategy that fits the customer's requirements.

Creating the mission statement

The mission statement will give the overall guidance on achieving the vision. Identifying the pain points, emotions, Go-tos of the personas will help you to do so. Think about what needs to be done to sell your vision to different customers.

Analyzing Core Competencies

Re-examining your team's core competencies and mapping them with your client personas can be extremely useful. By mapping these two, you can identify areas that need extra attention and further development. You might realize that particular customer service's core competencies are missing to please specific customers.

By looking at your competitor personas, you can uncover that specific product attributes are missing, and your product development team lacks the competencies to develop them. Summing up, the personas help to prioritize missing competencies or enhance those that already exist and are of high value for your clients.

Creating a SWOT Analysis

Depending on the depth of the analysis, this might be a pretty lengthy process. Conducting market research and analysis, customer reviews and surveys, financial projections, etc., are essential to a successful SWOT analysis.

Using personas as a source of information in this process is growingly common. Mapping strengths and weaknesses (internally) and opportunities and threats (external) with your client personas make the analysis more tangible.

Identifying and Solving Strategic Issues

Once you have identified the core competencies, created the SWOT analysis, and mapped both with your personas, you will define and communicate the strategic issues combined with a clear set of goals. Here is a quick example - how would you compare the following plans.

“We need to improve our customer service to increase our customer lifetime value.”

Vs.

“To increase our persona XYZ's customer lifetime value, we need to improve our technical email support. It will enhance the trust and avoid anger towards our service, which seems to be a significant trigger to cancel our service for persona XYZ.”

Creating clearly defined goals for the different personas will save you money and help the various teams better allocate the resources.

Define performance indicators and actions

Once the goals are set, you need to define how to measure their success. Having dynamic personas in place, meaning you can track the impact of specific actions on your personas, will help with the evaluation.

Let us take the example of the goal above as an example. The persona XYZ reflected a significant amount of anger towards your customer service. Once you improve the email support, in this case, you can look at your dynamic personas and check if the anger decreased and ultimately resulted in a more positive customer experience.

Responsibility Assignment

To decide who should do what is often the most significant challenge when solving specific problems. Using personas as a visual representation of the clients and their needs often helps. You can map the personas with your staff and allocate the resources that you think match best. In addition, HR personas will help you to find new people to meet the requirements.

Summary

Especially in the “New Normal World,” organizations need to adapt. Covid 19 impacted everybody, and customers changed accordingly. Creating and updating personas is crucial to making the right strategic decision.