Customer Segments vs. Customer Personas

Are your followers actually potential customers?

Whether you love social media or hate it, it’s definitely a very effective way to connect with paying customers. Learning how to use a customer persona will help you create a simple measurable benchmark to help guide all of your social media decisions while allowing you to see if your efforts are effective or not.

When we started Virtual Collective five years ago (a company that builds and manages virtual teams for clients who need digital services), we learned a lot about creating content for the wrong customer.

At that time, we had no idea how to find and target customers, or how to collect and analyze data. We jumped right into writing blogs and posting content on social media channels without having a plan in place for who we thought was our ideal customer. We were obviously missing something because our followers were not turning into customers, and our customers weren’t even our followers. There was a big disconnect.

Who doesn’t like having a bunch of followers on Instagram and likes on Facebook? But think about it: if those people following and liking aren’t buying what you’re selling, they’re nothing but vanity metrics. You need to evaluate how much time you spend on creating content for followers vs. customers.

We created some really great content, but it was for the wrong customer—because if you think about it, what small business owner doesn’t need digital services? It’s important to target your ideal customer, not your ideal market. “Small business owner” is a market, not a customer.

We had been inadvertently trying to reach the small business owner who didn’t necessarily know what they needed. They also required a lot of education and hand-holding, only to discover that they really didn’t have the budget for us to manage and execute what they actually needed.

I knew for a fact that the few “Theo” clients we did have were not looking for blog posts online about “How to Set Up Your Facebook Business Page”, and they definitely didn’t care about our Instagram posts showing me at home with my sick kid working on my laptop.

And while we loved working with “Susan”, our services were too much of a stretch for their budgets. We couldn’t afford to keep working for free and expect to stay in business. So we decided to embrace Theo and Susan’s unique characteristics and started focusing on defining our services to match their specific needs better.

Now, Virtual Collective targets the “Theo” persona—and for the “Susan” customers, we started Her Data Method, which is a series of online courses designed to help “Susan” succeed even though she might not be ready for a full virtual team yet.

What’s an “FFF”? A friend, family member, or follower. These are your loyal fans, not necessarily loyal fans of your product, and they are often different than customers. They might not even quite understand exactly what you do, but they might refer one of their friends to use your services, and you can be damn sure that they will “like” every one of your posts!

Don’t get me wrong, in no way are lots of followers a bad thing, but it’s important to recognize that these people are not really helping your bottom line. It’s your customers that are the people who do help your bottom line. They’re the ones buying what you are selling. They will engage with the content on your social channels, and they’re willing to click through to your website and buy your stuff, show up to your event, or sign up for your newsletter.

These are the people who don’t necessarily have a personal connection with you but they share your aesthetic, they speak your language, and they have the money and interest to follow through help you make a sale.

The goal is to find that sweet spot where the two groups overlap. This is that magical area where your followers have a better chance of becoming an active customer.

The good news is, it’s not magic—it’s methodical. You can actually move more followers into that circle by intentionally creating a measurable customer persona. The whole point of social media is to connect and build strong relationships with your customer. It also gives you the ability to reach them where they are and bring them back to your website.

You have a lot of people at your fingertips that you can learn more about, so why not create a detailed persona to help target your ideal customer and spark engagement?

Don’t forget to leave room for the possibility that who you THINK your target customer is might not actually be the case.

Don’t be tempted to take any of this personally. In our case, we had two completely different personas and it actually hurt us to try and cater to both audiences with the same content. Discovering that we needed to adjust and re-focus our efforts was a game-changer. I just wanted to warn you that the outcome of this exercise might be different than your assumptions, so stay open to new possibilities!

Some of you might also be thinking that, like us, you had already defined your customer persona already. We thought we had a pretty clear idea of who Susan was, but we eventually learned our assumptions were based on opinions and impossible to measure!

To help you avoid the same kind of mistakes we’ve made I thought I’d share the process that helped us demystify how to create a customer persona.

Once we learned that there are three main types of factors to consider when defining your customer persona it suddenly made a lot of sense. In our new Intro to Data Collection course, we have assembled questions for each factor designed to help you identify three different types of basic measurable information. I’ve included several examples of each type of question to help you get started.

Are you ready to get to know your target customer better than you ever thought possible?

Start by gathering some basic facts about your customer.

Demographics are measurable facts. Think about statistics. This is how we sort and organize populations. These are black and white truths, don’t make any assumptions here. To find your customers demographics you can ask questions like:

Now, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about how they make decisions.

The next factor is psychographics. You’ve probably been hearing this word lately in the news. This is the kind of information that can get companies into trouble if used incorrectly. It gets sketchy when this information is used without your customers’ knowledge. However, it is important to identify these factors when defining your ideal customer, because you have to step into their mind. Psychographics are still measurable, but they do require some assumptions.

Your customer’s actions speak louder than words.

Behavioral factors are determined by your customer’s actions. In this step, you will get to think more like a detective.

If you were spot on with your customer persona, great! Keep up the good work. And if you were right but still aren’t seeing any increase in sales, no new followers, and no new signups for your email list, this can still be good news. That’s the beauty of data collection: you can see where you were wrong, and you can see where you need to make adjustments. Maybe you need to tweak their age or their occupation—or maybe they don’t have a pet. Point is, now you know who not to target. You already know your product is fantastic, you just need to find the people who agree with you.

  Marketing to everyone is expensive, so evaluate how much time you spend on creating content for your followers vs. customers.

  Follow the 3 Main Factors when defining your customer persona.

  Test and refine your assumptions by setting goals.