Creating Wow Customer Moments: Step 1, Personas

If you want to craft powerful customer moments, your starting point is understanding your customers. If you don’t understand their drivers, desires, needs and wants - your customer moments won’t have the impact they could otherwise.

Start with Data

You've guessed where you need to begin - your data. Using data from Google Analytics and your box office data, you can start segmenting your audience data. If you had a chance to attend the Ticketsolve Forums you'll have heard from Katy Raines of Indigo. Katy took attendees through how best to start segmenting arts customers.

These segments give you a broad view of your customers and can help you to define who your best customers are - and their value. While this is a great place to start we want to go one step further to help us create customer moments - we want to bring these segments to life through personas.

Personas

A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. You should create one persona per segment. While a persona is a composite - giving your personas real names and being as descriptive as possible will help to make customers concrete in your mind.

What to include?

When you start writing your personas, you'll want to include a few key details:

Name (it is better to use a real name rather than "panto customer"

Job title

• Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)

• Details about their role

Demographics

• Age

• Gender

• Salary / household income

• Location: urban / suburban / rural

• Education

• Family

Goals and challenges

• Primary goal

• Secondary goal

• How you help achieve these goals

• Primary challenge

• Secondary challenge

• How you help solve these problems

Values / fears

• Primary values

• Common objections during sales process

Miscellaneous

• Hobbies

• Real quotes from customers (feedback or survey data or box office anecdotes)

• Computer literacy

• Where they get their news

• Blogs they read

A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step into the shoes of the persona - and see your arts organisation from their view. This will allow you to see things from your personas vantage point and help you to better see what works and doesn’t work for her.

Try and get in as much detail as you can and remember the above is a guide - if you cannot fill in each section it may not be applicable. You may need other details that specific to your venue or space. And you can always go back and add in details as you discover more.

And don’t forget to include your most valuable resource - people - when creating your personas. Your box office teams are invaluable in helping to create these personas, as they will have insight into the real people your personas are based on.

Personas take time to create and refine. But they are an invaluable marketing resource for any content you are creating - besides just being useful for creating customer moments.

With your personas and segments in hand, the next step in our journey is creating an end-to-end customer journey. In a few weeks, we’ll take a look at how to build a customer journey and identify all of the places where a special customer moment can be created.