Customer Personas: The Basics (FREE TEMPLATE)
Customers are the lifeline and driving force of your business. Without them, your business would cease to exist. That’s why it is important to understand your customers’ wants and needs and how they think and feel. The idea is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You want to learn how they see your brand and discover their habits, behaviours, and interests.
Creating an accurate customer persona can help you accomplish this. If you have never created a customer persona before, don’t worry, it’s easier than you might think.
Here’s what you need to know.
What is a customer persona?
A persona is a semi-fictional representation of a brand’s typical customer. They represent the key traits of a group of consumers based on data that’s been collected by the business. Personas help brands understand their customer on a deeper level.
Why do customer personas matter?
The goal of any business is to gain customers. These customers are who build your brand and share your products. They are also crucial contributors to the financial health of your organisation.
Customer personas help businesses understand customers and prospective customers better. They make it easier to tailor content, messaging, product development, and services to meet your target audience’s specific needs, behaviours, and concerns.
Some things to consider
Specific and detailed customer personas are invaluable and should guide almost every aspect of your marketing. But where can you find information about your customer persona?
- One of the best places to start is your frontline employees. Staff in your sales or customer service teams have direct contact with your customers and will be able to identify common traits in your customer base.
- Look at Google Analytics. If your brand has been around for a little while and has a website, you might very well have a large data set about your audience already at your fingertips.
- Take a look at your social followers. By hitting follow, these people have shown an interest in your business; take a closer look and see whether these people share any similarities.
- Have you tried all the above areas and still aren’t sure? Why not directly ask people who are interested through surveys. There are plenty of options available, like Instagram polls and EDM questionnaires. A little incentive never hurts either – something like a 10% discount can be a great way to encourage people to participate.
Putting it all together.
Once you have an idea of what your target audience looks like and some of the similarities they share, it’s time to create your detailed customer persona. Download our template to get started! Our template will guide you through the process and provide prompts to assist you in building a clear picture of your target consumer.
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