HOW TO CREATE A CUSTOMER PERSONA: WITH EXAMPLES & TEMPLATE

Customer personas are your ideal customer. They’re semi-fictional profiles based on quantitative data, market research and user behaviour, used by companies to inform their marketing strategies, align sales comms and reach their desired demographic with targeted messaging.

Most brands have an idea of their audience and make assumptions about their likes, dislikes and aspirations based on their demographic. But creating customer personas removes this guesswork, giving you a model to target customers based on thorough, actual audience research and data.

How many customer personas should you have?

Because users interact with your brand in different ways, you’ll need to create a handful of customer persona examples that represent all your customers. This can be done by aligning basic demographic information with patterns in their behaviour, classifying users into specific segments that best define your customer personas.

Customer personas can bring great value to your business. Here are the four main advantages of using customer personas:

Get to know your customers better

Building customer personas will give you a clearer view of your customers’ likes, dislikes, aspirations, desires, habits, and pain points. Essentially, it will help you to view them as living, breathing people. From this, you can target different groups with focused messaging, which will improve your sales and marketing strategy and increase brand advocacy.

Segment your marketing

One of the most powerful ways to use customer personas is to segment your marketing campaigns, creating unique messaging and ads for each group. Tailoring your campaigns in this way ensures they’re effectively targeted towards the right users, maximising ROI, and improving the overall experience for the user.

Develop new products, services and UX elements

Customer personas give you deep insights into your users and customers which can be used to inform new products and services, as well as to improve the overall user experience. Discovering behaviour patterns and pain points through buyer personas is an effective way to improve and refine different aspects of your business.

Customer personas are only effective when they incorporate real-world data. The goal is to establish who your customers are as opposed to who you’d like them to be. So how can you do that? Follow the steps outlined below to harness deep audience research to create compelling customer personas.

Use social listening to engage with your audience

Social listening is a great way to pick up on problems, work out how to solve them, and engage with your audience. Through tools such as Hootsuite, you can target different topics, conversations, and keywords, including your brand name, to analyse user what they like about your brand - and discover problems of which you may not be aware.

Use surveys, questionnaires and interviews

Surveys and interviews are a great way to uncover user pain points. Try asking them questions about their experience on your website, their views on your brand and products, and what brought them to your business. And don't be afraid to use incentives to encourage users to take part.

Check in with your customer service team

Customer service teams are perfectly placed for engaging with customers. So use them to your advantage. Ask them for feedback on some of the most commonly asked questions, themes, and complaints that customers have about your service, so you can find out what’s working and what isn’t from a product and service perspective. It can also be a good idea to ask customer service teams to carry out customer interviews on your behalf, so you have even more info to inform your customer personas with.

Be clear on how you can benefit users

It can be difficult to take an objective view of your business and see your products and services from your customers’ perspective. The great thing about building customer personas is the insights they give into how customers perceive your brand; insights which you can use to develop in the right areas, refine your offering and solve your customers’ problems.

Take the data you’ve collected about your customers and think objectively about how you can solve any problems and pain points and ultimately give them what they want. Understanding how to serve each of the customer categories in your persona index is crucial, and will inform how you use the personas to transform your messaging and develop engaging campaigns for each persona.