Defining Your Customer Personas

In today’s marketing landscape, data is king. Thanks to data, brands have more insight than ever into their customers’ interests, preferences, and buying habits. Yet it can be easy to forget that people are connected to those data points—those who have their dreams, motivations, and challenges in life.

Brands often segment customers based on personal information, but few take it one step further by creating customer personas. And it’s these personas that provide brands with a deeper understanding of who their customers are, what they need, and how a product or service can help.

What Is a Customer Persona?

Simply put, customer personas are fictional representations of a brand’s ideal customer. Based on research and analysis of real customers, these personas help brands build detailed profiles of hypothetical buyers. And these profiles can go well beyond basic demographic information to include personal motivations, values, communication style, and more.

Below is a simple example of a customer persona for a fictional clothing brand.

How to Create a Customer Persona

Now that you know what a customer persona looks like let’s dive into creating one. Here is a step-by-step guide to getting started:

Step 1: Research your customer base. Understanding existing customers is critical for building brand loyalty and converting leads into customers. That means brands must first do some in-depth research into their behaviors, interests, and preferences. Brands can:

Use marketing analytics to break down preferences by gender, age, and other demographic information.
Conduct keyword research to uncover information about what they value most.
Send out surveys and interview customers one-on-one
Ask sales teams to define the characteristics of their best customers.
Review customer feedback and reviews

Step 2: Refine your data. As you research, be sure to organize customer information into categories such as:

Personal information
Career history
Habits
Purchasing behaviors

Don’t forget to create a list of questions for each category. This will make it easier to tie demographic information to motivations when creating personas.

Step 3: Create your customer persona. Now you’re ready to create one or more detailed customer personas. You can design your template or download an existing one online. Here’s how to do it:

Start with basic demographic information.
Tie it to motivations and behaviors to determine how the brand can best help these customers.
Give each persona a name, so everyone internally refers to it the same way.
Provide sales teams with this information, along with how to best appeal to each persona and how to respond to objections.
Craft messages for each persona. Be sure to “speak” to them in the vernacular they prefer.

Step 4: Create a negative customer persona. Although this step is optional, it can help you avoid marketing mistakes and misspending budgets. A luxury brand, for example, would want to create a negative persona for bargain hunters—even if they check most of the right boxes otherwise.

Keep in mind that this may not be a one-and-done process. Launching a new product or service may require creating new customer personas. The same is true when a brand launches in a new market. Customers with similar backgrounds may have different buying habits and values in other countries. And this information is vital for successfully localizing marketing campaigns.

How to Turn Customer Personas into Strategic Action

Once you’ve created customer personas, it’s time to integrate them into your more comprehensive marketing plans. Here are just a few ways brands can turn these insights into strategic action:

Refine existing segments to create even more highly personalized content.
- A segment that includes professional women ages 30-45 can be broken out further to include information about family, lifestyle, and interests.
Create persona-specific content that is more likely to resonate with that audience.
- A customer persona interested in sustainability may signal that similar customers will enjoy emails about a brand’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint.
Speak to customers using the communication style they prefer. That may include using emojis, adding hashtags, or using slang. Or it may mean using a different language altogether.
- For example, Spanish speakers in the U.S. may prefer to receive emails and notifications in their native language, even if they speak English.
Use information about where different personas spend their time planning advertising and marketing spend accordingly.
- For example, let’s say Skylar the Student spends his free time scrolling through TikTok videos. That may mean the brand’s online ad budget would be best spent on that platform instead of Facebook or Instagram.

Mapping out how customer personas can influence different marketing efforts can help lower acquisition costs, boost sales productivity, and strengthen brand loyalty. It also makes it easier to tie them to other measures of success directly. Going back to Skylar the Student, a brand that wants to attract Gen Z buyers may decide to move its social media budget to Tiktok, and this would likely result in a higher ROI on social media ads within the quarter.

Final Thoughts

While customer personas require more time than segmentation, they can further enrich your marketing efforts—and the customer experience. By taking a deep dive into how customers think, how they behave, and what they value, you’ll be better positioned to deliver brand messaging that not only resonates but keeps them coming back.