In this guide, you will learn about creating customer personas to reach your intended audience. By analyzing certain customer data points, you will be able to determine the type of content your audience engages with.
Also Read: Digital Marketing for Dummies
Table of Contents
Why is it important to know your audience?
When you identify your audience, you can create digital marketing campaigns that interest and engage them. This can lead to brand growth and increased awareness.
Knowing your audience involves learning details about their lives, such as their geographic location, interests, online activities, and preferences. It’s important to understand what content your audience likes and how they like to consume it.
For example, do they enjoy receiving humorous content via email? Maybe they like to be introduced to new products via social media ads. Perhaps they are more likely to engage with an ad if they see it while they’re on a website they frequently visit. There is a lot to consider when you are thinking about your audience but start by learning who they are.
Who is your audience?
Understanding customer personas
Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They are profiles of your likely customers, based on data and research. Creating customer personas can help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or product. Personas allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may turn into customers, rather than random people who may not have any interest in your company at all.
There are a few ways to create customer personas. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Xtensio, and Up Close & Persona have persona generators built in. However, if you prefer to create your own, you will need to conduct some research.
Asking the right questions
Using surveys, interviews, and/or data that already exists in your automation tools, you can find the information needed to create your personas. That information will most likely be demographics like gender, age, geographical location, income, education, and job type.
If you collect this information through surveys or interviews, you must ask questions based on your business goals. Sometimes, it’s as simple as finding out your customers’ personality traits, hobbies, and social media platforms they use to engage with brands.
A customer persona example that includes sections labelled for identifiers, background, demographics, goals, and more
Note: Your customer personas may not look exactly like this. They may be more or less detailed or include different information. It’s all about what is right for your company. You will get more in-depth instructions on how to create customer personas in a later reading.
Key takeaways
Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They:
- help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products
- allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may turn into customers
- can be created manually or using automated tools
Customer Personas FAQs
What is a customer persona?
Customer personas (also known as buyer personas) are semi-fictional archetypes based on user research and web analytics that describe key characteristics of a large segment of your audience.
What is a customer persona example?
Businesses typically have multiple buyer personas, each describing in detail why they buy their product or service. The person’s age, location, job title, goals, and challenges, for example.
How do you identify consumer persona?
You can identify and speak to your customer personas by following these steps.
- Identify Your Target Customer.
- Create Your Customer Personas.
- Choose Your Marketing Channel.
- Craft Your Message.
- Constantly Refine Your Customer Personas.
- It is more important than ever to know who your customers are.
What are the 4 personas?
The four types of online purchasing personas are competitive, spontaneous, humanistic, and methodical. When creating your online strategy, knowing how each persona thinks and behaves could be extremely helpful.
Characteristics of a good persona
The creation of user personas that are truly effective design and communication tools is not as easy as selecting some characteristics and calling them a persona.
A good persona should have the following characteristics:
- Personas aren’t fictional representations of what a target user might think. A persona should be based on real data (observed and researched).
- User personas reflect real user patterns, not different user roles. There is no correlation between personas and roles within a system.
- Personas focus on the present state (how users interact with the product), not the future (how users will interact with the product).
- Personas are context-specific (they focus on the behaviours and goals specific to a product).
5 Steps to creating user personas
- Collect the information about your users
- Identify behavioural patterns from research data
- Create personas and prioritize them
- Find scenario(s) of interaction and create user personas UX documentation.
- Share your findings and obtain acceptance from the team
Generally, when creating a user persona template, you should include the following information:
- Persona name
- Photo
- Demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, family)
- Goals and needs
- Frustrations (or “pain points”)
- Behaviours
- Bits of personality (e.g. a quote or slogan that captures the personality)
Customer Persona Podcasts
Make My Persona by HubSpot
Create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better. Here
Conclusion
Research is usually conducted early on in the design process to create user/ customer personas. Personas are often created during the second phase of the Design Thinking process, the Define phase. Personas can also be developed iteratively, as can most design elements.
User/Buyer Personas will be used during all later phases of a design process to inform design decisions made by the team.
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