Personas can help you target the right audience, with the right message, via the right channels, at the right time in their buying journey.

An effective way to advance your marketing and communication strategies is through the development of rich customer personas. Personas are proxy representations of your customer base and/or target prospects you are trying to attract. Personas are built on insights from qualitative and quantitative data.

The analysis of this data reveals the types of accounts your customers use, their financial habits, goals and opportunities to serve them better. These insights can then be used to personalize your marketing and communications to customers and prospects with similar characteristics.

1. Drive Deposit and Loan Growth with Personalized Messaging

Millennials are a key example of why personas and personalized messaging are essential. Millennials range in age from 24 to 39 – and have different financial needs based on their age and life stage.

Younger Millennials may have recently graduated from college or are starting to establish their careers. They are trying to build their credit or manage their student loan debt. Financial products and services that are likely to resonate with them are credit cards, consolidated loans and retirement accounts. – very different from those of older Millennials.

Older Millennials, may be more established in their careers and have a growing family. They might be looking to purchase or improve their home. They may want to increase their savings for emergencies, their children’s education or their retirement. Financial accounts you should promote with older Millennials include home loans, IRAs, 529 college savings plans and other savings accounts.

If you are treating Millennials as a broad cohort with “one-size-fits-all” messaging, you will miss the opportunity to attract specific sub-segments. Marketers who leverage personas will be able to drive deposit and loan growth by promoting the right products and financial solutions to the customers based on their life stage.

2. Maximize Your Return on Investment (ROI)

As marketers, we have a variety of channels we can use to reach our prospects and customers. Certain marketing channels are more effective than others when targeting different customer segments. Through the persona development process, you’ll uncover targeting insights and characteristics to drive engagement and conversions in the right channels by customer segment — and maximize the return on your marketing investments.

Digital marketing is the most effective channel to leverage your personas to drive maximum return on your investment. Using the demographic and behavioral insights of your personas, you can create look-alike audiences and target those individuals who have similar characteristics and profiles to your current customer base. Create distinct campaigns, with personalized messaging, landing pages and calls to action to optimize your conversion rates across all persona segments. You can receive rich and immediate analytical data from these highly addressable channels to see how well your campaigns are performing and then refine the message fast.

Traditional media channels, including direct mail, radio and billboards, leverage the value of personas through similar characteristics and broader profiles. Due to the wide reach of these tactics and the limited personalized targeting capabilities, identify similar demographic and behavioral characteristics, across all your personas and use them to inform your messaging.

3. Improve Retention and Satisfaction

Once you have acquired a new customer, it’s important to continue communicating with them on a regular basis. Using the demographic and product information acquired during the account opening process and matching it with your personas, you can tailor your onboarding communications to highlight additional products and services that would be of most interest. Use the personas to emphasize online and mobile banking services that are most relevant to that customer.

Develop versioned newsletter based on your personas to continue engaging and educating your customers. If you don’t have the budget or resources to create different versions, you can re-sequence content based on the audience segment and their unique personas.

These ongoing communications and targeted, personalized messages demonstrate that you are committed to your customers succeed financially with the products and services they need to manage, save and invest their money. This will also increase customer satisfaction and retention.

Need help developing personas so you can start targeting the right audience, with the right message, via the right channels to drive growth? Schedule a consultation now.