5 Steps to Defining Your Customer Persona

Spending money blindly on ad campaigns without knowing who your customers are is a real waste. Which customers are ready to “say yes” and buy your products or services? That is why knowing how to define a customer persona helps you set your goals and business strategy, get the most out of your marketing budget and choose the right content direction. In this article, MONA Media walks you through defining your target customer persona step by step.

What a customer persona is

What is a customer persona? A customer persona is simply a detailed marketing profile of one or more people or a specific organization. The profile includes basic information on demographics, behavior, interests and the factors that influence the purchase decision of that audience.

A customer persona is built from market research, real data, surveys and well-grounded assumptions about potential and existing customers.

Building a customer persona matters to many departments in a business, such as: sales, marketing, customer care and product development…

On top of that, a business's products often serve different audiences, so it needs more than one customer persona to match its goals.

Why do you need to create a customer persona?

Building a customer persona is very important for any business. It is the starting point for your key marketing and sales strategies.

Creating a customer persona helps you understand your customers' needs in depth, so you can produce engaging communications and propose ways to meet those needs (product/service design).

Without a customer persona, it is very hard to get products/services to the right audience (it is easy to target the wrong people), and you may create messages that don't fit.

Example: If you are running Facebook Ads advertising services, defining a customer persona is essential. The main goal is to understand customer needs so you can create the right ad campaigns, and it is also a way to optimize your budget for better results.

Customer personas matter in every part of marketing. Specifically:

• Marketing strategy: The foundation of a marketing strategy is the customer persona, which helps everyone in the business understand who you need to reach. When you understand the market well, carrying out marketing strategy also takes less time and money and delivers a higher ROI.
• Marketing decisions: Once you know what customers think and expect of your products/services, you can make marketing decisions and craft accurate messages that increase revenue.
• Content marketing: You will be able to create articles and videos that attract potential customers. Images play a big part in good promotional content, giving customers a clear, detailed picture of the business. That is why it is worth investing in corporate photography, product photography hay personal photo shoots play an important role in a business as material for quality content that catches customers' attention.
• Paid traffic: Analyzing your target customer persona tells you which traffic to buy and which options you can use.
• Product creation: Create the products customers need. Set goals, know what customers want and need, and from there find opportunities for new products or services.
• Copywriting: Helps you frame your offers and speak to customers' problems in a way that makes them want to buy.
• Email marketing: Helps improve email conversions, open rates and more.
• Conversion optimization: Once you understand your buyers' characteristics, it becomes easier to identify potential customers and introduce suitable products/services that lead them to convert.

Defining a customer persona in marketing gives you time to focus on potential customers and meet the needs of your target audience by creating the right products. It also helps you organize your marketing, sales and customer care teams better, while increasing conversions for sales and marketing campaigns and raising order value and satisfaction among both potential and loyal customers.

5 key components of a customer persona

What does a customer persona include? The 5 key components are:

• Goals and values: What matters to them in relation to your products/services. This information is used to shape products and marketing campaigns.
• Information sources: Find out where your target customers are and where they gather (both online and offline), so you can decide the best place to advertise to your customer avatar.
• Demographics: Their age, gender, job, marital status, income and so on. This is useful when writing content, emails and sales copy, or when choosing filters on ad platforms.
• Challenges and pain points: Helps you develop product ideas and solve problems. In particular, content and ads that speak to pain points and common problems tend to get customers to act.
• Obstacles and roles: The reasons your target customers don't buy your product, how to remove those obstacles, who influences the decision, or whether they are the main decision maker.

The 5-step process for defining a customer persona

To define your target customers accurately, follow these 5 steps:

Step 1: Set the goal for building your potential customer persona

Researching customer personas and identifying the right potential audience helps you:

• Know what role this customer plays in your sales process.
• Understand the basic needs and wants of potential customers.
• Collect the right data.

Step 2: Collect data on potential customers

Channels that help you collect data on potential customers include:

From inside the business

Staff across your departments have all dealt with customers in some way. The best people to ask are in marketing (especially the social media team), sales and customer care. Each department sees customers at a different stage of the sales process. They know how to “keep customers happy” in specific situations, so they may already have a picture of the ideal customer in mind that just hasn't been written down yet.

However, information from this source is limited to what is already known about customers, and it rarely produces new ideas.

Customer analysis and survey tools

If you want to understand customers better through concrete figures and analysis, consider online customer survey and analysis tools. Survey tools include: online questionnaires, Google Analytics, survey events on your fanpage, market research reports…

In online surveys, though, people only answer within the limits of the questions you give them. Some online respondents are just after the survey gift, so they answer “without thinking” or pick the same option every time. Asking the right questions and choosing your survey channel carefully helps you avoid this.

-> See also: How to create and embed a Google Form on your website

Listen to customers on social media

You can join forums and social media groups that fit your target market, or research search keywords on Google. That is where you will see what customers care about most.

The easiest way is to collect customer information through your own website and social media. Your website shows which topics people read, page views, how often customers come back… Social media shows customer needs and engagement through likes and comments. Study this feedback and note what it tells you.

This approach usually takes a lot of effort, and you need solid online customer research skills. Above all, be careful when filtering information, because seeders may muddy the waters with fake buzz.

Interview customers directly

This method is especially important if you don't want your whole ad campaign to head in the wrong direction. You need to reach people who use the product regularly and who engage actively with the product, with your messages and with your competitors. You can find potential customers at the point of sale while they are buying. Invite them for an interview or survey to find out what made them decide to buy.

With this approach you can usually only interview a few people, the questions are somewhat random, and you need to analyze the answers to understand customer needs.

Step 3: Process the information you collected

From the data collected above, start sorting the information into categories such as customer psychology, behavior, demographics and interests… and arrange them into groups.

Most products have 2 to 4 ideal customer personas. Criteria that make them easy to sort include:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Their problems
• Channels customers spend time on
• Factors that influence the purchase decision

Step 4: Give them an identity and a face

Imagine your ideal customer as a specific person with an unmet need. Give this person a short name of 1-2 words that shows whether they are male or female, and pick a face that matches the customer you picture in your head.

Step 5: Add details to your potential customer persona

After grouping customers by basic characteristics, start fitting descriptions to the ideal customer you created above: lifestyle, demographics, interests and concerns about the products/services you are offering. If you have more than 1 ideal customer persona, sort them carefully so customer traits don't overlap.

Mistakes to avoid

One mistake many businesses make is this: They assume their potential customers are anyone with a lot of money.

This is a mistake. If you only focus on customers with a lot of money who have no need for your products/services, you end up wasting money and effort. You will spend a lot on advertising and your ROI – your return on investment – will stay low.

That answers the question “What is a customer persona”. A customer persona is a model of the ideal target customer that a business builds for itself. building a customer persona is the basis for planning a business's marketing strategies and future sales. We hope the information MONA has shared is useful and helps your business identify its target customers more effectively.

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