Developing a Customer Persona for Your Business

Every good marketer knows that a good customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is an incredibly useful marketing tool. An accurate persona can help you streamline your marketing efforts and hone in on your target audience. If you’re just getting started to the marketing game, you might not know how a customer persona works or even what it is. So let’s go back to basics and discuss everything you need to know about developing a customer persona for your business.

What Is a Customer Persona?

First things first. Let’s talk what.

A customer persona is a fictional representation of your typical customer or a large portion of your client base. A customer persona outlines the key traits of your typical clients and can help you understand how your clients think and behave as they shop products or search for service providers.

Your customer persona can lend insights into important information about your clients, such as their needs and wants, as well as how they search for information, where they spend time online, and more!

Why are customer personas important?

Okay, so you made a detailed and accurate customer persona for your typical client. What’s the point?

In short, customer personas help you understand your clients. Understanding your clients can help you understand why they choose you, or your competitors, when searching for a particular product or service. And in turn, this information helps you see where you’re excelling… and where you might be falling short.

A customer persona that gives you good insight into your typical client base can help you focus your sales, marketing, and production efforts. By determining where your efforts are lacking, you can take specific action tailored toward your target audience.

How do you create your own customer persona?

Creating a customer persona takes some time and work, but it pays off in the end. The good news is that there are actually quite a few online resources available to help you out, including guides and templates. HubSpot offers a few different templates so you can choose one that works best for your business. Or if you need a few more information resources first, you might check out some of the articles highlighted in this UserTesting blog.

You can start by thinking about your ideal client—but remember, using live data will give you the most accurate information! That might involve talking to or even interviewing current clients to learn more about them, or delving more into web analytics to see how people are searching and where they’re hanging out online. Your contacts lists, submitted forms, and employee feedback are all good sources of data, too!

You’ll likely have a lot of raw data after that! The next step is to organize it and distill it down into useful information—demographics, motivations, concerns and wants, and more (this is where a template will really come in handy). It’ll take some time, thought, and organization, but we promise it’s worth it in the end!

Looking for a template that's both detailed and easy to use? Check out our comprehensive customer persona creation template!

Feeling Overwhelmed by Customer Personas?

We totally get it. Creating a customer persona from scratch can be hard, especially if you’re not super marketing savvy. But that’s why we’re here. At Corridor Consulting, we’re experienced with marketing techniques like customer personas, and we’d love to help you find your niche in the marketing world. Contact us today, and let’s talk about how we can help you grow your business.

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