A customer persona is a fictional character (that you and/or your marketing team creates) whose needs, wants, goals, and behavioral patterns match those of your target market.

Creating personas are essential to any marketing strategy.

Without them, it makes creating a strategy that targets relevant leads for your company a big challenge which can become both frustrating and expensive. Personas allow you to effectively target your marketing efforts and enable you to maximize your ROI.

How to Define Your Customer Personas

The first thing you will want to do when defining your customer personas is create a survey/questionnaire. These questions will help you start to define each of your customer personas. The questions that you ask will be specific to your product or service.

Here are two outlines that will assist you in generating your survey/questionnaire.

Outline for Business to Business Related Companies

• What does this person do for a living? What is their role in their company?

• What tasks are they responsible for? What services do they already use to assist them in their role?

• What are some challenges that they face and how are they currently overcoming them?

• What are some resources that they recommend for someone in their industry and specific role? (blogs, discussion forums, social media influencers that they follow, etc.)

Outline for Business to Consumer Related Companies

• What is their age and where do they live?

• Where they currently shop for other related products/Which is their current favorite and why?

• How often do they consume the product that you are offering?

• What Social Media networks are they most active on?

If you have the option to survey an existing customer base, you can usually get this additional information in exchange for a discount or a freebie:

• How did you find us?

• What is your favorite thing about your experience with us?

• What is one thing that you would improve about our product? What is one thing that you would improve about your experience with us?

• Have you/Would you recommend our products to your family and friends? Why/Why not?

How to Research Your Customer Personas

Once you obtain your survey data and defined your customer personas, you will have a good idea of where they hang out online. For business to business personas this may consist of specific industry blogs, specific social media influencers, etc. For business to consumer personas you will be able to narrow down the best social media platform to advertise on and now that you have their demographics, it should be easy for you to target your customers.

How to Reach Your Customer Personas

Now that you know what your customers’ needs and wants are and where they hang out online, you will need to cater your marketing messaging to them. In order to do this you will first need to conduct some tests. Create some ads that you and/or your team feel will best cater to each of these personas and test them out. From here you will be able to quickly optimize your ads and increase your conversions while maximizing your ROI.

Without creating personas, you run the risk of spending your budget with a minimal ROI – if any. Personas can help you to evolve your branding, messaging and overall customer service experience.

Create your first marketing personas by downloading our Buyer Personas Template.