The number one mistake marketers and copywriters make is putting pen to paper without first defining their customer persona.
If you can’t define your target audience, it doesn’t matter how amazing your product or service is, it will fail.
So, before you write a single word of copy, you must first create a perfect customer persona.
In this post, you will discover what a customer persona is and how to create the perfect customer persona.
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What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer that is built on market research and genuine data about your current customers. It includes consumer demographics, behavioral tendencies, motives, and goals.
Customer personas help you understand distinct types or groupings of customers.
You learn where a specific group lives, their age range, and possibly some of their typical shopping habits.
All of this information can help you gain a better understanding of these homogeneous groups and serve their needs more effectively.
Consider your buyer personas to be a personal story. You’re creating a story and context for the folks who are most interested in your product or service.
You want to know as much about them as possible so that you can deliver tailored service, relevant material, and useful sales information.
Your buyer personas are the greatest location to gather all of that information into a story that will resonate with you and the rest of your team.
Why is a customer persona important?
Buyer personas keep you focused on the needs of your customers rather than your own.
Consider personas whenever you decide on your social marketing plan (or overall marketing strategy).
Is a new campaign meeting the needs and objectives of at least one of your buyer personas? If not, you should reevaluate your idea, no matter how thrilling it seems.
Once your buyer personas are developed, you can write copy that speaks directly to the clients you’ve identified.
Build your social strategy on assisting your personas to achieve their objectives, and you’ll develop a relationship with the genuine customers they represent.
How to create a customer persona
Your buyer personas should be based on real-world data and strategic goals, not just who you want to hang out with. Here’s how to create a fictitious customer who is a perfect match for your real-world brand.
1. Perform thorough research
It’s time to get down and dirty.
- Who are your current clients?
- Who are your social media followers?
- Who are your competitors aiming for?
Check out our complete copywriting course for a more in-depth look at these principles but in the meanwhile…
Compile audience data from your social media analytics (particularly Facebook Audience Insights), customer database, and Google Analytics to focus on specifics such as:
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Spending power and patterns
- Interests
- Challenges
- Stage of life
- For B2B: The size of businesses and who makes purchasing decisions
It’s also a good idea to discover which social channels your target demographic uses. Using tools like Hootsuite Insights, Keyhole.co, and Google Analytics will help you gather more information.
You can also use tools like Buzzsumo and Hootsuite’s search streams to see who your competitors are targeting.
2. Identify your customer’s pain points
Depending on the items and services you sell, your audience’s aspirations may be personal or professional.
- What inspires your customers?
- What is their ultimate goal?
On the other hand, they have pain points.
- What issues or annoyances are your prospective consumers attempting to resolve?
- What is preventing them from succeeding?
- What obstacles do they confront in achieving their objectives?
Your sales team and customer service department are excellent resources for answering these inquiries, but another important alternative is to participate in some social listening and sentiment research.
Setting up search streams to monitor mentions of your brand, products, and competitors allows you to see what people are saying about you in real time.
You can discover why they appreciate your items or whether aspects of the client experience are simply ineffective.
3. Understand how you can help
Now that you understand your consumers’ goals and challenges, think about how you can help them. This entails looking beyond the features and assessing the true benefits of your product or service.
A feature is something that your product is or does. A benefit is how your product or service makes life easier or better for your customer.
Consider your audience’s key purchasing hurdles, as well as where they are in their purchasing path. Then ask yourself, “How can we assist?” Capture the answer in a single, concise sentence.
4. Create your customer persona
Gather all of your research and begin looking for commonalities. When you combine those traits, you’ll have the foundation for your unique customer personas.
Give your buyer persona a name, a job position, a residence, and other distinguishing features. You want your persona to appear genuine.
Assume you define a key client category as 40-year-old, professionally successful city-dwelling women without children who enjoy superb restaurants. “High-Achiever Haley” might be your buyer persona.
- She is 41 years old.
- She goes to spin class three times a week.
- She lives in Toronto and is the founder of her PR firm.
- She owns a Tesla.
- She and her partner go on two international vacations a year and prefer to stay at boutique hotels.
- She’s a member of a wine club.
You get the idea: this isn’t just a list of capabilities. This is a specific, thorough description of one potential customer. It allows you to think of your potential consumer as a person, rather than just a collection of data points. These characteristics may not apply to every customer in your target market, but they help to portray an archetype concretely.
When developing your customer personas, make sure to express both who each persona is now and who they hope to be in the future.
This helps you to consider how your products and services can assist them in reaching their goals.
Three types of personas
Many marketers make the error of creating a single consumer persona.
However, within the same audience, there are frequently multiple different consumer types with slightly varying interests.
As a result, you must create at least three primary sorts of personas for your visitors that take into account the various types of people who interact with your business.
1. Buyer personas
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target consumer who is interested in purchasing your goods or service.
Your revenue is most directly related to your target customer.
As a result, they play a critical role in navigating your marketing plans and communications.
2. Website personas
Your website persona represents all of the people who will be served by your website.
They assist influence your website design and incorporate crucial populations that buyer personas do not (such as current customers, clients of current customers, investors, prospective employees, the media, and so on).
3. User personas
User personas represent the people who will use your product or service, regardless of whether they have any influence on the purchasing decision.
These personas could be used to guide product design as well as communications on product benefits.