Building customer personas

Customer (or buyer) personas are semi-fictional profiles of your ideal customers. These imagined characters are built using data and research collected through market research. 

By creating a customer persona, you can guide business activity from product development to sales, marketing and service. This will help you convert more leads and retain customers for longer. 

Understanding your personas is crucial to your overall marketing strategy to win and keep valued customers. 

Build your personas on the typical attributes of a person who you feel will be most likely to buy from you. You should include things like where they live or work, how old they are, how much money they make, and their hobbies and goals. It's also essential to give them a name so the process feels more personalised.  

You shouldn't assume you know everything about your target customer. Base each of your customer personas on real-world data collected through research, surveys and interviews 

Some practical methods for gathering information include:  

• Interviewing your customers to learn about what they think of your product or service 
• Scrutinising your customer database to identify any trends  
• Using forms to capture important customer information  

By going through the research process, you should hopefully have already drawn a lot of appropriate data relating to existing and potential customers. Use this research to identify any trends or patterns from which you can develop at least one primary persona.  

HubSpot have a free customer persona template that you can download and use for your business.    

The number of personas you build will depend on the nature of your business and the marketing activity you will be carrying out. Ask yourself who your products and services are for. The bigger your market, the more personas you will have. But it's important not to get carried away and create too many, as you want to be able to use them to direct your marketing campaigns with maximum effect. 

Customer personas will vary greatly depending on your business's sector and who your target audience is. Check out these examples of great customer personas for inspiration to get you started.  

Once you've created your customer personas, it's time to put them to work. There are a ton of different things you can use your customer persona for. You can use them to craft content and social media posts, to work out how to best communicate with your audience and even inspire new products or services.   

Customer personas are crucial when it comes to the success of your business, so it's important you thoroughly research your personas and make sure your full team is aligned to who your ideal customer is. Your customer personas should underpin your entire marketing strategy.