You can’t reach your ideal customers if you don’t know them. Going by who you think your customers are — without any data to back up these thoughts — isn’t going to cut it if you want to be successful.

Instead, creating customer personas is the key to attracting your ideal customers and inciting business growth. Before we guide you through creating a customer persona, let’s explore how customer personas drive business success in more detail.

Customer Personas Drive Business Success

Developing a customer persona is essential for your business’s success primarily because it allows you to connect with your ideal customers more often and help them develop a long-term relationship with your business. When you know your ideal customers’ struggles, wants, and needs, you’re more prepared to make your company and products more appealing. This will likely lead to more conversions and a better bottom line.

A customer persona can also be influential in how you organize your company. Instead of having departments and employees just to have them, you can restructure your business so that every department and worker is there to support customer needs and keep them at the forefront. Keep reading to learn how to create the perfect customer persona for your unique business.

How To Create a Customer Persona

Creating a customer persona isn’t difficult. However, it does require intention, strategy, and attention to detail. Here’s how to make a customer persona that drives your business’s success.

Analyze Customer Data You’ve Collected

You may have to start with your gut or hunch to outline your customer persona. However, it’s not a good idea to use this strategy long-term. Instead, as your business grows, put tools in place to collect customer data at each touchpoint.

Your website, social media profiles, email list, landing pages and other digital marketing channels are fantastic homes for data analytics tools. Analyze secure customer data collected through surveys, customer service channels and sales platforms. Then, take notes on what you learn.

Explore Commonalities and Trends

Every customer is different. The way to build an outstanding customer persona is to look for commonalities, trends and patterns in your customers that represent the majority. That way, it’s easier to narrow your customers to one or two ideal personas.

Note the most important trends, patterns and commonalities among your customers based on the data you’ve collected and what your customers have to say. This can be garnered from quantitative or qualitative data. For example, customer feedback may overwhelmingly include a need for personalization in your products. This is a common thread that should be worked into your customer profile.

Get Input From Your Team

Each department in your business has interacted with your customers in some capacity. As a result, your employees are an essential resource for figuring out who your ideal customers are and how best to reach them.

It’s crucial to overcome any organizational silos to get a full image of your ideal customer and protect all of your customers’ experiences with your business. Sit down with each department to get input from your team about your customers. Encourage them to share their experience working with clients. If they don’t directly interact with consumers, ask about their perception of the company’s ideal client or requests they’ve noticed from current clientele.

Once you’ve consulted with your team, looked at the data and drawn the most important commonalities and trends from it, bring everything together in a formal customer persona.

Use a Template or Create Your Own Outline

The next step is getting all the above research and data into an organized document that serves as your customer persona. There are plenty of customer persona templates to choose from online. You can start there or create one from scratch.

Document the Details

Your customer persona won’t be as valuable as it can be if you don’t include the details. The more information you have in your customer persona, the better your marketing, sales, customer service and overall business will be.

Try to include as many of the following as possible:

  • Name — a made-up name that represents your customer base;
  • Demographics — including age, gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, and employment;
  • Location — city, state, and country of their likely residential location;
  • Family situation — including marital status and children;
  • Pain points — issues that the majority of clients want to be resolved;
  • Strengths — such as connections that could contribute to your company;
  • Searcher intent — why they would be searching for your company;
  • Selling point — the turning point that gets them to make a purchase;
  • Hobbies and interests — including activities that will give you insight on where to find them, online or otherwise;
  • Buying behavior — how often they make certain types of purchases;
  • Digital presence — like what social media profiles they are likely to have;
  • Favorite brands — including competitors and non-competitors for inspiration;
  • Hopes and dreams — to tap into your ideal customer’s mindset and how your business can help them achieve their goals.

Document as many details about your customer as possible to ensure you’re looking at a complete picture of who they are, what they do, how they think and what they need.

Continually Refine Your Customer Persona

Your customers will evolve, so your customer persona must evolve with them. When data reveals new details about your customers’ needs, update your customer persona with this new information. You can even think about creating a customer relationship map so you have a visual representation of the ideal customer and can update preferences easily. Keep refining your persona so that you’re always serving your customers’ most current needs, wants and desires.

Conclusion

A customer persona can help you discover more ways to attract your ideal customer, drive conversions and boost your bottom line. Use the tips above to create a customer persona that drives your business’s success today.

About the Author: Beau Peters is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest with a passion for purpose-driven business content.