An Introduction to Customer Persona

A business’ main objective is to sell the products or services that they advertise for. But because business and growth depends on the sales and profit derived from consumer demand and spending, your target markets will decide whether or not you will face bankruptcy or explosive growth. Therefore, extensive relationship with your customers is needed in order to know who your consumers well, as well as their demands. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know your customers personally when they are of a large number. Based on this can you create customer personas and group them depending on their similarities of demographics, needs, and behavior.

What is Customer’s Persona?

In a nutshell, customer personas are fictional characters designed to represent your group of consumers, allowing you to familiarise yourself with your customers. This allows you access to information such as their age, their marital status, their income and expenses, their spending pattern, personal and work information, online behaviour and their attitude and behavior towards your product. Your group of customers should be categorized based on their similarities, in terms of demographics, activity (purchasing behavior of your product) and preferences.

Customer persona enables you to identify the needs and behavior of certain groups of people in your target market. This is important for your business in order to better sell your product or service to the right people, within the right time and place. With customer persona can you design and deliver your products and services to fit your customer’s specific needs, behavior.

So far, here's what we now know about customers' persona:

  1. It is a representative, fictional character that represents your customers from different groups

  2. It will guide you to better marketing of your product or service to consumers as it identifies their needs. You can identify what types of product or service they need, which channels the use, and how they would use your product or service

  3. It is essential for every business, whether it is B2B or B2C

How Is Customer Persona created?

There are several options you could use to create customers' persona. These options include brainstorming, website analytics and survey. However, it is better to combine these techniques so that a more accurate representation of your current customers can be generated.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is important in creating a customer persona. It is inclusive of the people across different departments involved in communicating with your customers, whether it be marketing, business development, sales or customer services. Based on their experiences on dealing with individuals or clients, you can categorise your typical customers and start to build the persona for each group of the customers. Identifying each current customer's journey, their problems and how well your product or service is performing.

Website Analytics

You can track who, where and when people browse your site. And to stretch it further, you gain access to information such as knowing how different types of individuals spend and consume your content from the analytics. Thus, identifying customer behavior. From this point on, you will be able to identify which groups of people are more interested in your products and services.

Survey

This involves asking your current customers about their own behavior and usage towards your product or service. The survey collected then becomes your primary data from your customers. Therefore, it is the data you can rely on. Before you start the survey, you can cluster them between active and inactive customers, two groups that differentiate between regular customers and the ones who rarely utilize your product or service. You can justify your active or inactive customers based on your ideal product lifecycle.

Customer’s Persona Template

There are several websites that you can use to create customers persona, listed below are the top 5 sites:

  1. Hubspot template

  2. Content Harmony template

  3. Buyer Persona template

  4. Buyer Persona Institute template

  5. Xtensio template

Customers' persona can be changed over time. However, it is essential for you to know how to sell your product to the market. Particularly for the marketing, business development and sales team, customers' persona allows them to tailor to the right form of communication when they talk to customers, based on our knowledge about them.