How to Create Customer Personas

Upon the launch of your business, you’ve likely investigated the type of person who would be interested in your offering. These people likely share common attributes or other defining characteristics that identify them as a distinct audience. For example, your audience might all be eco-friendly and prioritize their health and wellbeing. Or they may be family-first homeowners that live for weekend outings to the mountains. 

Regardless, to be a successful marketer it is of utmost importance that you continue to market with your target audience in mind. This may sound complicated at first, after all how do you know what your audience is thinking? The answer is customer personas. A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target audience that can be easily referenced in your content production efforts. They are relatively easy to put together although they may require a little research. 

To help you and your team get started, we put together our beginner guide for creating your first customer personas. If you find your team is still having difficulty honing in on your ideal persona after a quick review, give us a shout! It’s what we’re here for. 

1. Develop Your Question List

To begin creating your persona, you may start by talking to some of your existing customers or using other forms of customer research to answer the following questions:  

• What is their name?  
• What is their age?  
• What is their educational background?  
• What do they do for a living?  
• Where do they live?   
• City? Country?  
• Apartment? Single-family home?  
• What are their primary pain points?  
• What do they value most?  
• What are their goals?  
• Where do they go for news and information?  
• Are they on social media? What social media platforms do they use?  
• Where do they typically make purchases from?   
• What motivates them? (I.e., family, money or something else)  
• Describe a day in their life.  

These questions are just a starting point for your research and may grow and evolve when you learn more about what matters most to your audience.  

2. Conduct Customer Research

It’s true that one on one conversations with actual customers will provide you with the most accurate information. However, if you are limited on resources or are about to launch a new product other popular methods include: 

• On the street interviews 
• Running an online survey 
• Conducting a focus group  
• Using industry reports and other online research  
• Passing around a questionnaire 

3. Put a Face to the Name

After answering some of these initial questions, you will be well on your way to creating your target personas. But what helps many marketers put them into practice is putting a face to the description. Websites like Unsplash or Pexels provide copyright imagery you may add to your persona for free. This combined with a catchy title like, “Healthy Heather” can be a great way to call this research to mind. 

4. Rinse and Repeat

In many cases, your product may have appeal to more than one group of buyers. Therefore, you may need to repeat this process multiple times, once for each audience set. Although you may not be able to create a persona that perfectly matches each of your customers, you should be able to accurately group the majority. 

5. Market With The Customer in Mind

Now that you have your personas built out, it is time to use them. As your team begins to craft new messages and catchy slogans, consider your persona. What language would they use? What problem are they trying to solve? When considering a new campaign, does the proposed set of steps target at least one of the personas you identified in the previous steps? You want each marketing initiative to be driven with intention and to reach the people you worked so hard to research.  

Marketers who learn how to do this well are often the ones that are the most successful in converting prospects to sales. Interested in learning more?