A marketers guide to customer personas
Read time: 8 minutes
If you want to target your marketing, and really hone your message and campaigns to your best, ideal customers, then you should seriously look at developing customer personas. Sometimes called buyer personas, these marketing tools are critical in implementing a customer segmentation strategy.
Personas help keep you, the marketer or executive, grounded and focused on your ideal customers when you make marketing decisions, such as what type of advertising to invest in, what messages to send, and how to nurture a lead. By tailoring your messages by using personas as a filtering tool, you’re campaigns are more likely to be successful and you’re company is more likely to grow.
The best personas are based on real customers, and they summarize key findings from your customer research initiatives. This helps you better understand your customers, and help implement that understanding in your sales and marketing efforts.
A mistake we often see if creating personas that aren’t grounded in customer research; at that point, they are fictional representatives of a person, but not necessarily the type of person you are trying to reach.
More learning:
And you don’t want to spend time and energy, but ultimately each the wrong person! Which can happen — good marketing tactics, but a wrong-fit strategy or persona — can bring you back to square one.
In addition, when a persona is not used, companies can quickly lose their focus. Messaging and marketing decisions can become muddled instead of targeted, ultimately lessening their effectiveness.
With all the day-to-day challenges of running a business or marketing department, It's easy to take your eye off your target customers. Not because you intentionally want to, but because you have a lot of things come at you!
Think of your persons as a North Star, guiding your decisions, which should all align around your ideal customer and customer groups.
Warning signs for when customer personas are needed
We've found a number of warning signs or "tells" when it's obvious that a company is not grounding its marketing decisions in research or targeting its ideal customer groups. This includes:
Making decisions based on how you like to be marketed to or what resonates with you. The mistake is focusing on what you find valuable instead of your ideal customer, which is often not the same thing.
For example, while consulting with one client, we found marketing efforts were focused on cost savings, whereas the ideal customer was wanting to maximize their value. They were less worried about the price and more focused on how this particular product could help them be more effective in their business — ultimately saving a ton of time, and time is money.
Making decisions based on the latest marketing trend or platform. Marketers love to brainstorm, and we are supportive of that! But not every small business needs to focus on TikTok, for example, when 80 percent of their prospects are still on Facebook.
There’s always going to be a “new” something in digital marketing, but whether to move forward, and how much to focus on the new trend, should always be an intentional decision. Using a persona will create a North Star and help filter that decision.
Brainstorming without customer context or research. Often, teams will brainstorm ways to get in front of customer or how to reach them in a way. This can be helpful, especially when focusing on how to incorporate a specific customer’s pain points and shift their perspective with your company’s solution.
However, brainstorming sessions can go off the rails when they lose their focus, or their North Star, on the ideal customers they are trying to reach. Brainstorming with personas keeps the team focused on serving the ideal customer.
Creating a persona based on educated guesses. Sometimes, well-intentioned marketers or business leaders will make up a persona based on who they think buys and their best guesses for why. But this doesn’t necessarily match reality.
For example, a fast food chain wanted to increase the sales of milkshakes, but after engaging in customer research, they realized that the “job” the milkshake was filling for their best milkshake customers was not a sweet treat or dessert. These ideal customers were morning commuters who knew they’d be hungry by 10 a.m., were facing a boring commute, and thought a milkshake would make the long drive more interesting. Plus, a milkshake is cleaner than a donut.
Creating personas using national data. This is well intentioned, but misses the nuances that are naturally caused by looking at averages. For example, looking at national housing trends doesn’t paint the picture needed if your services are focused in Iowa, or Los Angeles, or the rural South.
Whenever possible, use company-specific data or drill down into take that focuses on the characteristics of your ideal customer. If you’re a B2B company, for example, you may look at the industry you primarily serve and the geographic region that you primarily draw customers from, among other factors.
>>> Deep Learning: A marketers guide to customer segmentation <<<
How to collect information for a customer persona
The best customer personas are specific to the company and focus on their priority customers and priority products or services.
The idea is to narrow down your focus to the group of people you can serve the best. That doesn’t mean you don’t sell to other types of customers, just that you don’t market to them specifically.
Here’s how to get started in creating personas:
Business objectives: The best place to start is first to understand (or set) your company’s business goals. Is the goal to increase sales of a specific product, such as in the milkshake example? Or is it to better market to the most profitable or most loyal customer groups, in which there may be multiple products or services in play?
Other times, companies may use industry research, especially if there is a threat of new competition for younger buyers. Seeing industry trends and understanding industry focuses can help businesses better understand how to set long-term goals.
Customer observations and interviews: Depending on the type of product or service, watching customers physically pick up a product and decide whether to purchase can be informative, as can immediately interviewing them about their decision.
In more complex sales, such as in B2B marketing, observations may not be possible, so conducting 1-to-1 interviews with customers where conversations reflect on their buying experience is most helpful.
B2B sales typically have longer sales cycles and involve more people, so you’ll want to ask about different perspectives that emerged in the buying process, as different buyers are likely present or involved in the sale.
Customer surveys: While they gather more opinions, surveys also tend to be shorter in nature, meaning you ask fewer questions.
Surveys are best used in confirming the findings of individual customers, as you’re more likely to ask and measure closed questions that result in a yes/no answer or a rated scale of 1-5.
What to include in a customer persona
Once you’ve collected information about your customers, now it’s time to analyze the information to spot obvious trends. Are customers primarily of a certain age group, or have a similar job title, or trying to solve a similar problem?
When you create a customer persona, remember that it's a descriptive tool. The information included doesn’t necessarily cause the sale.
For example, a driver doesn’t buy a milkshake at 9 a.m. because he is in his mid-30s, but rather because he has a job that he wants done: He wants something to entertain himself on the way to work. Being in his 30s is a correlation, but doesn’t cause the purchase.
Here re some common traits to include your persona:
B2B Persona
Job or responsibility
Industry or company description
Demographics, such as age, gender, education
Media preferences, such as whether they read certain publications
Social media preferences
Typical day
Company goals and challenges
Professional goals and challenges
Buying journey
Buying experience
Customer experience (including what might cause him or her to leave)
Key messages that resonate
B2C Persona
Demographics, such as age, gender, education
Geography or location
Media preferences, such as whether they read certain publications
Social media preferences
Typical day
Personal goals and challenges
Buying journey
Buying experience
Customer experience (including what might cause him or her to leave)
Key messages that resonate
Approach the interview like a journalist
One of the biggest challenges in putting together an accurate customer persona or buying persona is asking the right questions:
Ask open-ended questions to existing customers — think of yourself like a journalist when conducting customer interviews — so you’re not putting words in your customers' mouths.
Never assume. Such as in the milkshake example, you don’t want to ask leading questions. You want to allow the customer to articulate their thoughts without prompting.
Allow them to fill the space. Instead of talking or explaining your answer, stay silent after you’ve asked the question.
Create a safe environment. You want your customers to speak honestly. Some companies will engage a third-party to ensure customers feel like they can share the good, the bad, and the ugly
Ask the right questions
For a journalist, often the hardest part is figuring out what questions to ask — it lays the groundwork for everything, and will ultimately determine the success of the research and story.
Before the interview, take time to detail out what questions to ask, working backwards from what types of answers you are looking for.
One example is to ask questions that allow the customer to verbally walk through each specific decision-making stage of their buying journey.
Customers can sometimes make dozens of small, incremental decisions as they become aware of their need for a product or service. For example, you might ask open-ended questions such as:
How did you become aware of your need for a solution?
How did you research the solution?
How did you become aware of this company’s solution?
Walk me through the buying process. What was that like?
One thing to note: Sometimes it takes a while for customers to warm up. As a journalist, I called this "thought clearing."
I found that the people I was interviewing — not professional politicians or seasoned PR pros, but everyday people — needed to warm up a little before giving the answer that actually meant to say.
Good follow-up questions, such as "what do you mean?" can be helpful.
When to pull out your customer personas
Buyer personas can be used in a variety of instances, and we’ve actually worked in a company that hung printouts of personas on the wall and in key places to continue to remind the team of who they were writing for and trying to reach.
Other clients have kept personas close at hand in a strategy binder that they brought to meetings for quick reference and to remind executives of their target audience.
Personas are a helpful tool not only in making decisions, but explaining why the decisions are made.
There are many ways to use personas, such as when you:
Decide what media or social platform to focus on, especially when it comes to advertising spending or a considerable time investment.
Create campaigns or marketing plans.
Set up a CRM, the best ones suggest using personas when crafting customer journeys.
Guide the creation of content strategy or plans.
Craft specific advertising or marketing campaigns that are intended to reach a certain ideal customer, as represented by the persona.
Write marketing emails or social content for specific campaigns.
Research new services or product development ideas.