What Is a Customer Persona — and Do You Have One?

To sell your product or service, you need to know who you’re selling to.

But how do you do that? By investing hours and hours and thousands of dollars on complicated market research? By going out and interviewing tons and tons of your customer base? Sure, that might help, but what if you don’t have the time for all that? After all, you’ve got a business to run.

The good news is that there is a simple way to get to know your target customers that doesn’t involve all that. You just need one thing: a customer persona.

What’s a customer persona? We’re glad you asked.

What Are Buyer Personas and Customer Personas

You can call it a customer persona, a buyer persona, a user persona, or an audience persona – but it all means the same thing.

These terms all refer to a fictional representation of your ideal customer. You want to craft a marketing persona archetype – or several – that contains all the important demographic information about your audience segments. But it also goes a step further than just that.

You want to develop psychographic information about them beyond just their job and marital status. We mean get inside their heads. What are their personalities like? What are their hopes and dreams? Their fears and frustrations?

What does their customer journey look like? What social media are they more likely to use: LinkedIn, TikTok, or Facebook?

You want these customer personas to be fleshed out as much as possible. They should be detailed representations of your real customers and their real-life behaviors, desires, and pain points.

Negative Customer Personas

In addition to designing a customer persona for your target market, you can also develop one for people who won’t be interested in your products or services. We know what you’re thinking. Yes, in an ideal world, everyone is interested in what you have to offer. But that isn’t the world we live in. (Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.)

No matter how hard you try, you can’t please everyone – and if you try, you’ll end up hurting yourself (and your conversion rates). To be precise in your marketing messages, you need to know the types of customers you want to sell to — and the type you don’t. For example, if you’re making a new energy drink, you don’t want to market it to Nancy, Age 86, who has heart problems, loves her grandkids, and mostly wants to spend her nights reading mystery novels.

How Personas Give Your Marketing Campaigns a Major Assist

Persona development leads to personalization, and personalization leads to increased conversions and engagement – among other benefits.

But how exactly do customer personas function? What do they provide that a quick glance at your Google Analytics dashboard doesn’t? More great questions we’re happy to answer!

Turn Demographics Into Real People

Research is great. We love research. But until you do something with that research, it’s a bunch of numbers on a screen.

Developing a data-driven persona from that research helps you visualize your potential customers and imagine a story surrounding them, their wants, and their needs. Stories help create empathy and understanding, allowing you to step into someone else’s shoes.

They provide deeper insights into who you are selling to than just their job title and age. Now you can design your marketing materials with an increased sense of, well, empathy and understanding – which in turn leads to better, more personalized marketing strategies.

Anticipate Their Pain Points and Build More Value

When you have a clearer view of who your customers are, you have a clearer view of why they should want your product.

You can clearly imagine their everyday problems and how your product can help them overcome them. You can then build more specific pain points and value propositions into your landing pages, ad copy, emails, and CTAs in a way that is personal to them and their experiences.

This kind of personalization is much more likely to score you an initial conversion. Not to mention, have them coming back again and again. After all, personalization increases loyalty.

Enhance Customer Experience

When you put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers through customer personas, you can better anticipate your customers’ needs. This can help direct new product development and even guide you in creating a better user experience for your website. All of which makes your customer happier – and increases their likelihood of returning again and again.

Precise Market Segmentation

If we didn’t make it obvious before, we’ll make sure to spell it out now. You aren’t limited to just one customer persona. You can – and SHOULD – create several. One for each of your target demographics (if you have multiple).

Then, all you’ve got to do is match your real customers up to these personas in your CRM databases. These customer segments help you send personalized, targeted marketing messages.

How to Make Customer Personas

The first step is to ask questions about your potential customers (either ask them directly or involve your sales team). This includes simple demographic questions, yes, but also psychographic questions.

Buyer Persona Template Questions

- What is their age range?
- What is their career path?
- What is their income?
- What is their family size?
- What are their values?
- Where do they get their information from? (What social media platforms or marketing channels are they on?)
- Where do they spend their time?
- Who do they trust most?
- What is their communication style?
- What are their goals, long-term and short-term?
- What are their biggest obstacles?

To answer these questions, you do want to do some persona research. But this doesn’t have to be complicated. All you have to do is hop onto social media and skim through customers who have engaged with your page or your competitors’ pages. Look into who they are, what they say, and how they say it.

Lift Your Marketing Efforts Higher

So, now you’re armed with all the info you need on customer personas – go forth and conquer.

Wait – what’s that? You still feel like it’s a bit too big of a task for you to tackle alone? It is true – getting inside the heads of others can be difficult to do.

Lucky for you, we’re here. Our stellar digital marketing team can help you figure out the ins and outs of your target customers and personalize your marketing materials to draw them in and keep them coming back for more. Sound good? We thought so. Get in touch today, and we’ll get the ball rolling.