How to: Create a Customer Persona

What is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona is a fictional person who represents your ideal customer/target audience. The purpose of creating a customer persona is to be clear about who you are marketing to. Until you identify your Customer Persona you might find that you market messaging may be all over the place (and consequently unsuccessful).

Where possible your customer persona based on your real customers and/or extensive research. You might find that you have more than one type of customer persona – this is fine, as long as you have a different but clear image.

Once you have created a Customer Persona any future copy, blog post, email etc should speak directly to them.

How to Create a Customer Persona

You can easily create a customer persona by identifying their key traits and personality.

• Name; Age; Where do they live; gender
• Marital Status; job; kids; salary
• hobbies interests; values; things they care about;
• talents; ambitions; politics

Start by having a look at your existing customers. What do they have in common? Why did they buy from you? As well as the information you already have – get more by carrying out a survey! Do some online research both into your own existing customers and your competitor’s customers.

If you are struggling to narrow down your customer personal and identify the demographics of your customers – why not take a look at your social media demographic information to give yourself a headstart. For example, you might use the demographics data on IG:  On Instagram provided that you have more than 100 followers you can get demographic data as part of your “insights”.

Write out your Customer Persona

Once you have done your research – you need to create an actual customer avatar or a document that sets out your findings that can become part of your brand guidelines for your business. Write down everything that you know about your ideal customer. There are a number of online tools that help you put together your customer persona.

Here are some examples:

• Demand Metric: Buyer Persona Spreadsheet
• Digital Marketer: Customer Avatar Worksheet
• Filestage: Buyer Persona Template
• Hubspot: Make My Persona (Generator)
• Hubspot: Persona Templates
• Marketo: Marketing Persona Cheatsheet
• Xtensio

This persona should then form part of your guidelines/marketing toolkit. As you develop your offering and gain more customers you should tweak and review your persona as appropriate.