Customer personas are archetypal users of a product or service. They are essential to help envision your customer and who they truly are. It is then, that you can properly target them and optimise your marketing efforts.
This blog post is all about how to create a customer persona and includes a FREE downloadable template to help you start making one. Just check out the download button at the end of this post.
Why Should You Use Customer Personas?
We are individuals and so are your customers; You cannot paint every single person with the same brush. To say that ‘everyone’ is your customer is the biggest mistake you can make!
While you might be tempted to segment a population into different broad categories such as location or age, the needs and wants of each customer may not be the same. For example, if you are a plumber, you might be tempted to say ‘Everyone in my city are potential customers!’ but this isn’t the case at all. You haven’t considered everyone that isn’t a home owner, or those who’s landlords deal with the plumbing issues, or those who are plumbers themselves. It would be fruitless targeting these kinds of people which is where Personas come into play.
Creating customer personas really helps you to properly understand your customers. Take the following three people for example. You could broadly categorise them into, female (29) male (34) and female (83). But, if you understood them properly, you would know they are all Pinterest lovers, dog people and have a passion for the environment. So your cat food in single use pouches is the last thing they want!
What Should A Customer Persona Include?
A customer persona is simple to make but should involve a lot of thought. It aims to cover everything you could need to consider when targeting your customers and should always include an image and name to help bring your persona to life.
In order to ensure you include everything in your customer persona, you should consider the following three categories. While suggestions have been made, if they aren’t completely relevant, then you don’t have to include them.
Demographics
Demographics are the basic details about a customer type. They unfortunately don’t provide much depth into what the customer wants but are essential in making sure you are targeting the right kind of people. Take location for example, if you can only serve customers in Manchester, then there is no point targeting your marketing efforts towards people living in London. Alternatively, if your service is for retirement, a 20 year old perhaps isn’t the best fit.
The demographic data in your personas should include:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Job
- Income
- Education
Psychographics
Psychographics are much harder to categorise than demographics but are equally as important. They consist of a customer’s beliefs, values, opinions and attitudes. Their lifestyle, interests and personality traits would fall into this category too.
One example of why psychographics are important could be if you have an eco-friendly product like a compostable toothbrush. It would important to market this product to someone who cares about their environmental impact vs someone who does not. Alternatively, if someone value’s values low cost over quality, then your luxury light shade perhaps isn’t for them either.
The psychographics to consider in your customer persona could be:
- Interests
- Biggest Concerns
- Values
- What Success Means To Them
- Fears
- Goals
- Challenges They Face
Webographics
Webographics are perhaps not the first thing one would consider when creating a customer persona but they definitely hold a place. As marketing has evolved to become more digital and less traditional, knowing where your customers reside on the internet is essential.
There is no point putting your efforts into Twitter if few of your customers use the platform. Equally, if your customers all use Bing as their standard search engine at work then optimising your website for Google would be irrelevant. These are all things to be considered when creating your customer persona so that when considering yourstrategy and tactics, you know exactly how to target your ideal audience.
The following things should all be considered in your customer persona:
- The Devices They Use
- Preferred Search Engine
- Frequently Visited Sites
- Most Frequent Internet Activities
- Average Time Spent On The Internet Per Day
Free Template
There is a lot to consider when creating customer personas. To make it easier for you therefore, I have created a FREE customer persona template for you to download. It outlines all of the areas you should be including when creating your customer personas and is a really useful outline to help you get started.
I would recommend printing it off and adding to it by hand. You could brainstorm with your colleagues and make it as extravagant as you like. Just remember, the more detail you include, the better you will be able to target your ideal customer!
I would love to know how you get on with the template so please leave a comment down below to tell me what you think. If you have any questions you would like me to answer too then I would be happy to answer them so leave them down below. I hope you found this post useful and have a great day.