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Table of Contents

1. Key Takeaways
2. Introduction: Customer Personas
3. Target Audience vs. Customer Persona
4. How To Develop An Ideal Customer Profile
5. The 3 Main Components of Customer Personas
   1. Who Exactly Is Your Customer?
   2. What Are The Goals Of Your Customer?
   3. Which Barriers Prevent Your Customer From Buying?
6. Sample Template w/ Data
7. Use Personas To Reach Your Marketing Goals
8. Conclusion

Key Takeaways

• How to create an ideal customer persona;
• Why a viable persona is so critical for target marketing;
• What a sample customer persona should look like (template included);

Introduction: Customer Personas

“You just need to ask the right questions to the right people, and present that information in a helpful way so your company can get to know your [customer] persona better than the back of their hand.” – Adele Revella, Founder/CEO, Buyer Persona Institute.

In order to get your brand to stand out in the crowded consumer marketplace, you need to create a profile – a target towards which to aim – of your ideal customer.

This profile is commonly referred to as a customer persona, buyer persona, marketing persona, or audience persona.

Once you’ve accomplished setting up your customer persona, you will be in a great position to start developing marketing materials with the right message aimed at the right audience.

Target Audience vs. Customer Persona

Some businesses or organizations have only one or two types of customer personas, while others have as many as a dozen or more.

This will be dependent upon your product or service, and the particular industry in which you operate. 

A customer persona is considered more narrow in nature, while a target audience is considered more broad in nature.

For example, if you are a luxury fashion brand that manufactures items, like handbags and shoes, your broad target audience might be women, between the ages of 45-65, with abundant discretionary income. 

However, your narrow customer persona might read as follows: women, ages 45-65, four-year college degree, professional occupation, annual income of $75,000 or higher, married or single, enjoys social gatherings, values environmental sustainability, follows fashion trends, and seeks high quality products that last for many years.

How To Develop An Ideal Customer Profile

You will want to conduct some research in your particular industry and compile as much data as necessary (this is where analytics can come in handy) in order to begin the process of creating your customer personas.

Your business or the company where you’re employed, may have already accumulated a lot of data about their current and past customers – this would be a great initial starting place.

Here are several other ways you might conduct that research:

If you still need more data, those same customers could be asked to submit to an interview – you may want to consider offering them some incentive to do so.

You could ask questions along the lines of what they liked about your products or services, would they want to see any aspects of your products or services changed or improved, and how willing would they be to recommend your products or services to another person such as a family member, friend, or work associate.

This last question is a widely used metric in the market research industry referred to as a Net Promoter Score or NPS (a single survey question asking respondents to rate the likelihood that they would recommend a company, product, or service).

There are many online resources available to help you create professional looking questionnaires and surveys – a quick Google search will display plenty of those results.

I will name two popular sources that I’ve used in the past:

Survey Monkey is the world’s leading online survey software provider;

Google Forms allows you to create and analyze surveys right in your web browser;

Reviewing and analyzing web data is another useful technique.

This is where software applications such as Google Analytics can be very helpful.

Analytic platforms can provide data such as gender, age, and location of visitors to a website or blog.

Another method would be to utilize your existing list of e-mail contacts, and send them a professionally prepared survey with the types of questions previously listed above.

The 3 Main Components of Customer Personas

Who Exactly Is Your Customer?

This can be answered in the following manner (Note: this is not an exhaustive list):

Demographics (e.g., age, gender, income, occupation, family size, education, and geographic location).

Interests (e.g., lives in a beach community, loves to go surfing, goes camping at lake resorts, and an avid boater).

Traits – (e.g., race, religion, socioeconomic status, political perspective, languages spoken, and military status).

What Are The Goals Of Your Customer?

This should relate to the product or service.

For example, with our luxury fashion brand that made handbags and shoes, some goals a customer might share would be as follows:

24/7 customer service and support.

Seeks high quality, long lasting products.

Desires unique fashion items that are not available in most retail outlets.

Wants to purchase from a company that supports environmental sustainability.

Which Barriers Prevent Your Customer From Buying?

For example, continuing with our luxury fashion brand, a customer might raise the following concerns:

They have purchased expensive handbags in the past and they lasted less than a year before needing to be repaired.

The company they previously bought from promoted environmentally friendly products, but it turned out that less than 10% of the material they used would be considered eco-friendly.

Would like a longer period than 30 days for a money back guarantee, considering the amount of money being spent.

Sample Template w/ Data

This data is best saved into a spreadsheet program such as MS Excel or Google Sheets, and organized by category: Who, What, and Which.

Here is a Sample Customer Persona Template complete with data, using the luxury fashion brand example above:

WHO	WHAT	WHICH
Who are your customers?	What are their goals?	Which barriers do they face?
Name: Jane Doe	1) High quality, long lasting products. 2) Promote and support environmental sustainability. 3) Unique, hard to find fashion items. 4) Round the clock customer support.	1) Concerned about the longevity of products. 2) Does not always trust eco-friendly claims by companies. 3) The time period for returning expensive luxury products is not long enough.
Age: 45-65
Education: Four-Year College Degree
Annual Income: $75,000 or more
Religion: Christian, Non-denominational
Languages: English & French
Political Perspective: Moderate

Use Personas To Reach Your Marketing Goals

Once you have reached this stage, your customer profiles should be preserved in an archive and used to help you create the various marketing materials you plan to utilize.

The newly created personas could be used to determine the following:

• What is the best type of organic or paid advertising message to direct at these personas? For example, a luxury fashion brand that sells handbags, may engage in an email campaign with the following type of messages:
  • “New Eco-Friendly Handbags Designed To Last”
  • “Built To Last, and Designed to Save (The Planet)”

• What types of promotional audio/video would be most appealing to your personas? – Lifestyle photos? Video clips? Animations?

• What social media platforms are frequented by your ideal customer profile? – Facebook? Instagram? Twitter? TikTok? LinkedIn?

Once you determine the platform(s) your ideal customer persona is likely engaging, you can use an industry guideline to determine when is the best time of the day, the best days of the week or the best time of the year to post your content. 

For example: according to a study on the best times to post on social media conducted by the marketing SaaS platform Hootsuite, here is what they discovered are the best overall days and times of the week for maximizing social engagement:

• Facebook – Mondays, at 10:00 am PST;
• Instagram – Mondays, at 9:00 am PST;
• Twitter – Fridays, at 9:00 am PST; 
• TikTok – Sundays, at 1:00 pm PST;
• LinkedIn – Mondays, at 1:00 pm PST;
• All Social Media – Mondays, at 9:00 am PST;

A related concept to keep in mind re: social media is how frequently to post on social platforms in order to maximize exposure to your target audience.

LinkedIn, for example, recommends posting at least 1 to 2 times per day, while Instagram on the other hand, recommends posting a minimum of 3 times per week.

What geographic locations do your ideal customers prefer to spend the bulk of their time?

For example, if they reside in the Southwest United States, they would be receptive to certain types of products or services, versus those who reside in the Northeast part of the country.

Are there seasonal considerations that need to be taken into account?

Buying trends (e.g., holiday shopping)?

Weather conditions (e.g., extreme cold)?

If your products or services are targeted at an international customer base, what types of geopolitical concerns should be addressed?

How does the legal and regulatory environment differ from your home country?

How does the strength or weakness of currencies impact your customer’s perception of the overall value of your products or services?

Conclusion

Have you developed a customer persona(s) for your products or services?

If so, what did you learn about your ideal customer(s) that you did not previously understand?

Feel free to leave a comment below.

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