5 Steps to Defining Your Customer Persona

It is a real waste to keep throwing money blindly at ad campaigns without knowing who your customers actually are. Which customers are ready to “close the deal” and buy your products/services? That is why knowing how to define a customer persona helps you set goals and a business strategy, maximise marketing returns and choose the right content direction. In today's article, MONA Media will walk you through how to define your target customer persona in detail. Let's dig in!

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 organisation. The profile includes basic information on demographics, behaviour, 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 rolling out 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 optimise your budget for better results.

A customer persona plays an important role and applies to 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 high 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 good articles and videos that attract potential customers. To create quality promotional content, images play a very important role, giving customers a clear, detailed view 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: Analysing 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 and know what customers want and need,… and from there discover opportunities to develop new products/services.
• Copywriting: Helps you present purchase offers and speak to customers' problems, making them want to buy.
• Email marketing: Helps improve email conversion and achieve higher open rates,…
• Conversion optimisation: 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 organise 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-component model of a customer persona includes:

• Goals and values: Issues related to your products/services. This information is used to create 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: Descriptions of their age, gender, job, marital status, income… in their lives. This is useful material when writing content, emails and sales copy, or choosing filters on ad platforms.
• Challenges and pain points: Helps you develop product ideas and solve problems. In particular, content and ads that talk about pain points and common problems tend to drive 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 with MONA:

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

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

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

Step 2: Collect data on potential customers

Some channels that help you collect data on potential customers:

From inside the business

To some extent, staff in the company's departments are the people who have already dealt with customers. The places worth asking are the marketing department (especially the social media team), sales and customer care. Each department has its own contact and experience at each stage of the sales process. They know how to “keep customers happy” in specific situations, so somewhere in their minds there may already be a picture of the ideal customer that just hasn't been put into words 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…

However, in online surveys, respondents only answer within the limits of the questions you suggest. Sometimes online consumers are just after the survey gift, so they answer “for the sake of it” or pick the same option every time. That is why asking the right way and choosing the survey channel wisely will help you avoid this problem.

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

Listen to customers on social media

You can sign up for forums and social media groups that fit your target market, or research search keywords on Google. There 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 are visited, page views, how often customers come back… Social media helps you identify customer needs and engagement through likes and comments. Study and collect information from this customer feedback.

This approach usually takes a lot of effort, and you need solid online customer research skills. Above all, you have to be careful when filtering information, because seeders may spread smoke screens that confuse the market.

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 analyse 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, behaviour, demographics and interests… and arrange them into groups.

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

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Their problems
• Which channels customers frequent
• Factors that influence the purchase decision

Step 4: Give them an identity and a face

Imagine your ideal customer has an unmet need and is a person with a defined identity. You can give this person a short name of 1-2 words that tells you whether they are male or female. You can 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 rate – return on investment will not be high.

That answers the question “What is a customer persona“. A customer persona is an assumed model through which a business shapes the profile of its ideal target customer. building a customer persona is the basis for a business to plan its marketing strategies and sell products in the future. We hope the information MONA has shared is useful to you and helps your business identify target customers more effectively!

You may also be interested in: Define your Customer Persona more easily with Maslow's pyramid