Your Guide to Creating a Customer Persona
Every aspect of your business or organization is most likely centered around two things: your product (or service) and your customers. While you are an expert when it comes to your product or service, it can be a daunting task to pinpoint who exactly is going to purchase from you.
Everything, from the improvement of your product or service to the message you craft and advertise to the world, centers around your ideal customer. So, it’s important to home in on your target market and create an effective and accurate customer persona.
What is a Customer Persona?
Stormboard defines a customer persona as a unique set of characteristics that defines a target audience most likely to purchase your product or service.
The key characteristic of this audience is that they have a common problem that is best solved by utilizing what your business or organization has to offer.
According to HubSpot, creating a semi-fictional character and bringing their story to life will help you and your team gain a better understanding of your target market.
Knowing more about your customers is essential for anyone in the product or service industry. It helps you to create marketing personas for your potential, or ideal, customers, and it can also help you define customers that you don't want to target.
Note that this isn't the same as customer demographics — that is more general, and a larger scope of your customers. A persona is more detailed.
How do you create a Customer Persona?
An age range and gender might be a good starting place, but to really identify the potential customer, narrow it down even further.
You’ll want to include the age, income level, education, and location in your demographic stats. Once you move beyond demographics, it’s a good idea to outline your customer’s personal and/or professional goals and challenges that your service or product will help to grow or alleviate. When you’ve gathered as much data as you can, and created your stats for your customer persona, give them a name and write a brief summary of this character to bring them to life.
You can also create a negative persona, which is the customer you aren't aiming for.
Once you have customer personas created, it becomes easier to execute tasks like marketing and product development with the newfound knowledge of your target customers.
Stormboard’s Customer Persona template
This template is divided into three sections: Picture and Name, Details, and Goal. These sections help you to define who the person is, what they value, and how to speak to them so that they will engage with your product or service.
1) Picture & Name
This is where you will define who the current or potential customer is. If you know who you are targeting already, this should be more specific than describing a general demographic. Here you can also define what kind of customer you aren't targeting.
Come up with a name, or names, of your potential customer(s). Add images of what your ideal customer will look like using image sticky notes.
Think of the demographics of your customer base, either the ones you have now or future customers.
2) Details
Once you’ve established who the customer is, this is where you will delve deeper into their needs and interests regarding your product or service (or potential product or service). Add more detailed information about your current or potential customer base.
This may include their location, what they are looking for in a product, what problems they want to solve, their hobbies and interests, and so on.
Start by asking these questions:
What kind of job does our customer have?
How much money do they make?
Where do they live?
Do they live in an apartment, condo, house?
What are their interests?
What kind of TV do they watch?
What do they do on the weekend?
What restaurants do they eat at?
Where do they hang out on the weekend?
Are they influenced by their friends?
Are they married? Single? In a relationship?
3) Goal
'Goal' is where you can decide how to communicate to the customer, and the goals you want to put in place to reach that specific persona. This section is more open-ended.
It can include new marketing tactics, how to reach potential customers, how to better engage with current customers, etc.
Conclusion
Once the sections have something written in them, plan how you will convert them into action. Your board will be saved so that your team can revisit it and make changes as time goes on.
This process will work best for those who are looking to acquire new customers, find ways to market better to your current customers, or narrow down what kind of customers you don't want to target.
Do you want to use Stormboard to create your Customer Persona?
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