2 minute read

Picture your customer.

Who is the person most likely to purchase your product or service? How old is he or she? Where do they live? What is their life like? What do they value? What problems do they need solved?

Can you jot down the answers to those questions? If you can, this is just a refresher. But if you can’t, it may dramatically alter the way you approach your work.

What Are Customer Personas?

Customer personas are fact-based representations of your audience. They help you move beyond broad demographic swaths to representative portraits.

Strong customer personas are built from market research and insights from your current and prospective customers. They have a representative name, face and behavioral profile so that everyone in your organization understands exactly who your customers are.

For example, a persona is not “women 25-40.”

A persona is, “Suburban Samantha.” Suburban Samantha is 25-40, a college graduate who works in health care. She is married with two kids and lives in a suburb of a mid-sized American city in a house she owns with her spouse. She’s a heavy Facebook user who dabbles in Instagram. She listens to top 40 radio and watches HGTV. She’s active in her children’s school as well as her church. Her motivators are being seen as a good mom who balances her career, home life and community involvement. Her barriers are cost and travel time.

The research that goes into creating customer personas can help your organization – for-profit or not – understand the specific needs and motivations of your audiences.

Organizations with well-defined personas know exactly who their customers are, what those people want, and how the organization’s product or service fits into their customers’ lives. That’s how they craft messages that matter to their customers and pick channels where those messages will be delivered.

Customer personas are the cornerstone of effective marketing campaigns. Download our free eBook, “How To Create Revealing Personas,” to learn more. It covers how to:

• Conduct great research
• Analyze your findings
• Create revealing customer personas
• Market to your persona

Want to talk more about your organization’s current and prospective customer personas? Drop us a line!