As a business operating in the Shopify space, you know the market is well-defined and getting pretty crowded. If you’re providing a specialist line of products, services or app, don’t sell yourself short by marketing your expertise to a generic, undefined customer.
You may well thrive on a bit of friendly competition, but when the cards are down, you need to know that your solution is unique enough to stand out and pull in customers that keep the lights on.
If you’ve read our recent article on nailing your USP, you’ll be well on your way to defining the elements of your value proposition that communicate something really special. But have you considered the other side of the equation - that is, the target customers you’re sending that message to?
This article will help you gain a better understanding of personas and how to work with them, ensuring your proposition is perfectly packaged to appeal to your ideal audience.
What are personas?
Simply put, personas personify your dream customers. They act as fictional archetypes, based on real customers, that concentrate your team’s understanding of the audience you’re courting.
By defining what makes them happy, frustrated, challenged, or appreciated, you’re able to get a much clearer picture of how to best meet their needs. Personas are not only about understanding how to communicate with your audience through well-targeted content marketing, they can also help you make better decisions when it comes to perfecting your products or services, defining your overall branding, and in knowing how to make your customers' lives easier.
A company will often work with a number of different personas to correspond to their various target markets. Each will have their own unique requirements (e.g. what content themes, topics and formats do they require to be taken on a conversion journey?). At Kollectify, for example, we have personas for Shopify app owners and Shopify merchants (in fact, one of our personas probably applies to you!).
Why are personas so important in the Shopify ecosystem?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. The Shopify sphere is a vibrant but competitive space. Typically within this market, offerings are laser-focused — an app solves a very specific challenge, a merchant solves specific needs or desires, each with a clear specialism.
As an example, if you’re looking to attract enterprise merchants to your Shopify app, it’s imperative that your value proposition is crystal clear and fully optimised to appeal to the very niche market that you’re working with.
Making use of personas helps your entire team communicate their expertise in a way that fully considers the motivations and needs of your target audience at every stage of their buyer and customer journey.
Customer research
Now you’re on board with the idea of personas and understand why they are so important, it’s time to explore how to actually create them.
Customer research is the critical first step in the persona profile development process. In order to get a true understanding of the audience you’re mapping, you need to talk to, and listen to, them.
If you’ve already started to conduct the surveys required for defining your USP, the good news is that you’ve already gained a lot of information. Getting a clear idea of what your users or clients think of your product or service, why they choose you over the competition and what pain points you solve within their businesses, it's all golden information when it comes to building out well-defined personas.
The Shopify market never stays still for long. With new products and brands continuously being announced, you’ll find that your audience’s needs and expectations will evolve and shift. Treat research as an on-going activity, and perfect your personas based on themes and trends you see developing.
What does a persona profile contain?
Once you’ve completed the all-important customer research, it’s time to turn your findings into an actual profile. Completed persona profiles should be placed somewhere safe, where your entire team can access them. They should be referred back to constantly as you develop marketing strategies and campaigns.
We recommend starting with a one-page profile for each persona, which includes the following points.
- A fictional name
- Demographics, including age, location, salary, job title
- Needs and aspirations: What are the pain points specific to their role? Personal goals and motivations? What do they need to make their life easier?
- Decision-making behaviour: Who do they trust or confide in for decision-making? Do they have a superior at work?
- Content consumption habits: Which social media channels are they active on? When do they spend time online? How frequently do they consume content? What are their go-to, trustworthy content sources?
- A fictional quote summarising their wants and needs
There are several great online services available to help you in this process — we particularly like Hubspot’s free “Make My Persona” tool, which guides you through a basic process. It captures lots of good baseline details and will help you on your way to defining your personas (although you’ll still want to dive into your research to add in their content preferences, in terms of both format and topics).
Creating personas is something that you can continue to refine over time — the better you understand your customers, the stronger your personas will become and the stronger your branding and marketing will become.
How to use personas
Okay, you’ve got your profiles and you’re feeling accomplished. What now? How do you actually use them? Here are three ways you can utilise them in your Shopify business.
Content Marketing/SEO
Personas form the basis of your content marketing efforts and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy. By getting inside the minds of your customers, you’ll know what types of keywords to build your research on and what topics to cover on your blog.
Furthermore, you’ll now know exactly where your customers prefer to consume content and in what format. For example, whether they spend their days on LinkedIn or Facebook and if they prefer articles or videos. You should also have an understanding of how they make decisions and this will guide you when figuring out what type of content is important to attract, close, and retain your different personas. Use your personas to build out an editorial calendar, making sure you have covered the various content types that will be required at each stage of the buyer journey.
Sales
It’s fairly simple, the more you understand your audience, the more you can create a brand and engage in marketing activity that resonates with them, the more your sales will increase. This is because you will be reaching the right people at the right time, with a message that is tailored to their needs or desires.
Your sales team will benefit from persona profiles as they craft sales scripts and figure out the best way to approach potential customers, making the close of that sale all the more likely.
Customer service
We all know delighting customers is an essential part of the buyer journey. Delighted customers become promoters for your brand. They’re more likely to give a positive review and talk to their friends and family about you. This word-of-mouth is invaluable and can aid other prospects in choosing you as their preferred solution.
Delighting a customer is about exceeding their expectations and creating positive emotional feelings about your business. This becomes significantly easier once you can understand and empathise with your customers through your persona research. Personas foster excellent customer service and help your teams know exactly how to serve, and build long-lasting connections with, your customers.
Personas: your passport to content strategy Nirvana
On top of all this, personas add clarity and direction to your business strategy — this is always beneficial but is especially important within the specialised world of Shopify. When you know your customers as personas, you’ll be able to produce highly-targeted content to attract, convert and delight over and over again. You’ll also be able to perfectly judge not only the topics, but also the formats that are most likely to appeal to them and tailor your content strategy accordingly. Powerful stuff.
Keen to develop personas and nail a winning content strategy? Fancy a bit of expert guidance?
We have built a program specifically for developers who want to attract Shopify merchants! For more details on the program lessons and 1-1 support, click here.