How to create customer personas for your tourism brand – episode 73

Tourism Upgrade with HollyG

How to create customer personas for your tourism brand.

Welcome to Tourism Upgrade, the podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism, and marketing leaders. I’m your host, HollyG, and today we welcome back to the podcast, Bronwyn White from MyTravelResearch.com, and we’ll be chatting about how to create customer personas for your destination.

What is a customer persona?

Customer personas are a fictional representation of your ideal customer or visitor. You may have a few personas representing the different key segments you attract or want to attract. It is a way to keep your customer top of mind and clear in your mind when you are making business discussions.

We talk a little about create customers personas in episode 67 when we talk about customer first marketing.

Bronwyn: Look, I try to think about persona as your best friend or, better still, your fictitious business partner, because we’re in business and basically everything begins and ends with your customer. We should be extremely intimate with that person so you need to run all of your marketing and business decisions by them first. So the aim is to create one or two or even three profiles and really get to know these people extremely well.

What sort of details are in a customer persona?

Bronwyn: All sorts of things. As we say to some of our clients and our customers, the details you probably already know a few. You probably know them better than what you think. Anything from demographics to … Demographics is sort of an old way to produce your personas. We talk more about attitudes, lifestyles, in this sort of day and age now with personas. Their types of interest, their attitudes, their special interests, internet habits, what are their purchasing habits, where they live, where they travel, what’s important to them in life, what are they seeking. Are they seeking things like to educate themselves, rest, R&R or immersive type experiences? There’s a whole range of things.

• demographics
• attitudes
• lifestyle choices
• special interests
• internet habits
• social media habits
• purchasing habits
• where they live
• where they travel
• what is important to them in life
• Things they are seeking (physically and emotionally)

Special offer from MyTravelResearch.com to podcast listeners, gain access to the MyTravelResearch.com Premium Membership Site free for a month! Click here for the details.

HollyG: You mentioned that a destination might have maybe two or three or four personas. How does that sort of work?

Bronwyn: So if I’m a destination or an accommodation, or caravan park, at the moment I might be interested in seniors, which then makes me interested also in the accessible travel market because as the seniors are ageing we’re seeing an emergence of the accessible travel market. So for example in that sense, “accessible”, we all think “just people in wheelchairs”, but as people age what we’re seeing in our research is that people do not want to stop travelling but they realise they have to change the way that they travel. So that’s a really good, efficient way to cut across markets, if you like. Then you might have that caravan park or holiday park accommodate pets. So they might also cater to the niche market, travelling with pets, which is also a trend and emerging market that we’re seeing, and then they could be families during the holidays. So, picking at a very, very basic level, who do you see? Who’s coming in? Who do you see driving down the main street, walking down the main street?

HollyG: Yeah, so identifying what markets you’re attracting currently and potentially even what markets you want to attract, that is going to suit your destination or your business going forward. Sort of identifying those categories broadly and then creating a detailed focus on each one. And the reason we’re creating this detail focus … I guess why should we have these customer personas?

Bronwyn: Okay, basically it helps you make a better decision. So if you’re making decisions based on you know if you go in blind-

HollyG: And we’re talking marketing decisions.

Bronwyn: Marketing decisions, any marketing decisions you are making without intimate knowledge of your persona or who’s coming in there. What we say to people is, “You’re relying on hope-marketing, you just put it out there and hope-marketing is right,” and hope-marketing is costly. It’s costly not only on your time, but also on your bottom-line, on the budget. So knowing everything about your customer, how they’re buying, what they’re buying, what they’re interested in, what their pain points are, what pushes their buttons, is really, really important in helping you promote your product or your destination.

HollyG: Yeah, I can see why having someone, really clearly in your mind when you’re rolling out marketing activities can help you make sure that you’re hitting the mark.

What are the steps to create a persona?

Bronwyn: At a very basic level I would look at who’s coming through the door, you probably get a good sense, you probably already have a good sense of who’s coming in, but start talking to your customers and ask them … Ask what they’re interested in, ask what they’re coming from. We see lots of places and we also hear this is when people ask for our postcode or where they come from, just informal conversations with your clients. You can make it more formal by having a little survey, a feedback questionnaire when people get home, to ask them more about themselves and what they’re interested in.

And there’s so much free research out there on the internet, if you’re looking for information about seniors or any sort of niche market, for example, fishing or food-and-wine, that sort of thing, there’s so much free information about what drives these people out there. So just looking at certain attitudes, what pain point are you solving for these people? So, do they want a family-friendly holiday? How can your destination or product help them with their family-friendly holiday, or how can you help me unwind, how can you help me experience the best of food-and-wine, how can you help me with local knowledge and local immersion? So just doing a bit of product matching with your customers and getting a feel for what drives these people.

Are there tools we can use to help gather information for our customer personas?

Bronwyn: Yeah, Google Analytics will help with things like geographic location, and what type of devices they’re coming in from and how they’re searching, and what types of words they’re searching for. Absolutely, there’s a lot of information in there.

HollyG: And what about our own, if we have got a customer database or something like that, is there things that we can pull from that.

Bronwyn: Yeah, you can probably survey them. A lot of people are too afraid to send a survey out, and I’m here to tell you, that sending a survey out to your customers to improve your product, tells them that you care … that you want to improve your product because of them. And believe it or not, sending a survey out to your customers is a fabulous PR exercise for your business or destination. So never be afraid to do it.

HollyG: Yeah, and what about many of us have social media or Facebook, is there information from that that we can garner?

Bronwyn: Absolutely, there’s social-talking, social-chatter, there’s a whole range of tools that you can use to find out what people are talking about. But the type of social media should also be a part of your persona that you’re building. Some are on Facebook, some might be on Instagram, we’ve got “Gen Z”, coming up now, they’re more interested in Snapchat and YouTube. So for each demographic, each market you may have a different type of social media outlet.

HollyG: Yeah, sure. I mean I find that with my clients, the person that we’re sort of talking to on Facebook, is actually different than the person that we’re talking to on Instagram.

Bronwyn: Yeah, completely different.

HollyG: And is there any other research or sources of information that we can use, that’s out there now, specifically, for our personas?

Bronwyn: Look I would say just do a Google search, just get on and search for “seniors travel”, or “seniors travel research”, or “family travel research”. We actually on our membership site- our premium site, we have ready-made personas already done, for our premium members. So on a few of our products we do that for you.

HollyG: I’ve had this idea, just say that I’ve got a database of, say, like 10,000, if I went through and saw what was the most common name in that database, just say it was “Jan”, then maybe include it in my customer persona when I’m developing it up, it might be like: “Jan Smith age da-da-da”. So, just pulling bits and pieces from wherever possible to bring it together, is that essentially what we’re trying to do?

Bronwyn: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, always give them a name because it brings them alive. And I can go through Bob and Cheryl if you’d like?

HollyG: Oh okay, sure.

An example of a customer persona in travel and tourism

Bronwyn: So, I’ve brought one with me to go through.

Bob and Cheryl, they were looking at the pet niche, travelling with pets.

So, Bob and Cheryl are recently retired and they love to travel. And they are planning their dream travelling around Australia trip, and want to take their dog, Lucky, with them- they’re really worried about their dog. And Cheryl’s the main travel planner of the house, and Lucky has been with the family for nine human-years, and he’s a central part of the family, they couldn’t possibly think about leaving her at home, it’s quite traumatic. So they’re worried how best to travel with Lucky, so this is one of their pain points. You have to think about how you can solve, how you can minimise the risk associated with travel for Bob and Cheryl.

So, travelling with Lucky, she wants to plan quite heavily and map out the best places that will cater to Lucky. So what I would say to the destination marketer or tourism marketer is make sure you have plenty of content around the fact that you can take pets, so that she can find you. She’s looking at caravan parks, parks and attractions that she can take Lucky, and the one thing, they’re willing to pay a premium to ensure Lucky is catered for, as well- they’re not going to skimp. But she’s worried about the limitations, what they can do with Lucky, and if there’s places they can and cannot take her.

We look at someone like Bob and Cheryl, who are travelling with their pets, but sometimes Bob and Cheryl appear as a VFR host, as well. Bob and Cheryl, they live in Queensland, they just moved to Queensland and their son and daughter come up with their grandkids during the school holidays, and so Bob and Cheryl might be VFR hosts in the school holidays, taking care of the kids. They have another persona as well, with different pain points.

HollyG: So it depends what hat their wearing at the time.

Bronwyn: That’s right, yeah.

HollyG: So what we’re saying is around developing detailed customer personas we get broad things like demographics, but its about looking at their attitude, their lifestyle, and what’s important to them, and really identifying their pain points.

Bronwyn: Absolutely.

HollyG: And then when we’re looking at executing our content or marketing, we really want to make sure that we’re ticking those pain points, or including those sort of things in our communication, on our website, in our social media activities, so these particular people feel this destination or this business is a good match for me and I’m gonna come and stay there.

Bronwyn: Absolutely, and they’re more likely to choose you over other businesses or destinations that don’t have that information available.

HollyG: Ah, yes, that’s right. Cool. Some people think that by developing a persona, like the one about Bob and Cheryl, that we’re getting a bit too specific, so that’s going to limit our marketing. What do you think about that?

Bronwyn: It’s better to be specific, than not be specific. You need to talk to the audience, they need to be able to resonate with you and what you’re offering. If you’re not specific and you’re trying to be all things to all people, not only is it confusing to your customers, but also confusing to the search engines. So persona development is more important than ever, especially in the age of semantic search, where not only do customers need to figure you out, but the search engines need to figure you out. If you’re not consistent in what you’re saying, and who you’re talking to in you’re marketing than the search engines will not be confident in presenting your product or destination in a search.

HollyG: Yeah, great. And can you just give us a definition of semantic search?

Bronwyn: So semantic search was an algorithm change, it wasn’t an update, it was a complete over-hall, about 8 months ago when google switched over and basically the search engines became more about semantics, based on true meaning, where they’re trying to match the best websites and webpages to the customer query. So it’s more intuitive now, and it’s machine learning. So, you hear all the time about artificial intelligence and machine learning … basically the Google algorithms are trying to learn what your website is all about. So if you’re consistent in talking about certain things, on your site and social media, the search engines are confident that this person, this site knows what they’re talking about, so therefore I’m going to present them in a search. So I’m sitting there looking for family beach holidays, Google goes, “well who’s the best page to present?”, based on my history. So it’s exciting and scary at the same time.

HollyG: Yeah, that’s right. How do you see social media can be used for general, regular consumer insights, or customer personas, is there a role there?

Bronwyn: Absolutely, because you can keep an eye on what they’re saying, as well, and you can keep an eye on what people are sharing. So what’s happening, you really nee dot keep a close eye on your social media content, what you’re pushing out there, because one of the things, as well, is that the search algorithms look at the social media as an indicator of what is being engaged with, what is being shared. If you’re putting content out there thinking “Oh I’ll just put it out there”, if it doesn’t relate to your persona, isn’t liked, isn’t shared, or commented on, then it’s not appealing to your persona. It’s a fine line you’ve got to tweak constantly.

HollyG: Do you have any final comments around the development of customer personas or any final tips?

Bronwyn: I would say that it’s never been more important, for all of those reasons, to develop your customer personas … Both for your marketing, and just pure efficiency as well for your time and budget. Just have a go, it’s not that hard. Just start really basic and it will evolve over time.

HollyG: Yeah, yeah great, and I love that idea of surveying our customer and not being scared to do that, because I think it can be a little bit scary or it feels a little bit scary.

Where can people find out little bit more about you or connect with you?

Bronwyn: Okay, they can go to our website on MyTravelResearch.com, and in-fact as I mentioned, we have a whole rang of pre-made personas on our premium site, and we also have a persona checklist available … We also have survey templates, as well.

HollyG: Yeah, great, excellent. Cool, well thank you very much!

Bronwyn: It’s a pleasure.

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Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au

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