Creating one or multiple customer personas helps your marketing goals align with your customer’s views, priorities and purchasing decisions. If you don’t know what a customer persona is or how it is supposed to help your organization, this is for you. Let’s dive into the definition of customer persona, its role in marketing and how to build one.   

Customer Persona Defined 

A customer persona is a fake customer profile. It helps you visualize who you are selling to. You can have one general customer persona or multiple that dive into the different types of customers that buy your or your competitor’s products and services.

The Role A Customer Persona Plays in Marketing

While a customer persona can guide an organization’s efforts to improve and design products, address customer concerns and help all your teams target the right audience, marketing is the most common place we see personas used because you can easily spend copious amounts of time and money advertising to the wrong audience, and no one wants that. 

While a customer persona helps guide everything you do within marketing, we will focus on how it optimizes lead-gen, content and messaging. 

Optimize Lead Gen and Nurturing Content 

Generating leads that turn into customers is the goal of every lead-gen marketing campaign. However, to get these results, marketers need to know who the target customer(s) are, what they want, and how your product can help them solve or fill the void they have. With this information, marketers can create targeted ads and lead nurturing content that builds trust and loyal customers. 

Personalize: Help Tailor the message to specific target audiences

A personal touch can go a long way in marketing. If your marketing team knows who they are selling to, they can personalize their marketing campaigns to these audiences. A personalized message is more likely to resonate with your potential customers, helping them relate to your brand and purchase your products and services. 

Building Your Customer Persona 

Now for the part you were all waiting for. The customer persona(s) building process, so you can create your own and start fine-tuning your marketing efforts. The main ingredients needed for a stellar customer persona include customer research and pattern recognition. 

Do Your Research First

 Before you start brainstorming the traits of your ideal customer, you need to do some digging to find out who your customer base includes. This step might mean going through past sales and customer service logs. 

If you don’t have customers yet or you’ve already gathered this information, it’s time to look at the types of customers your competitors have. An easy place to glean this information from is their customer reviews and social media interactions. 

Another method for gathering information about your potential customers is conducting focus groups for individuals or organizations interested in your product or service. 

Looking for Customer Patterns

After gathering client information, it’s time to figure out what it means by looking for patterns. As you sift through the data collected, take note of the recurring details. Do these customers have similar interests, problems, concerns or lifestyles?  

Build your Persona

Once you have cataloged all the patterns you see in the data, it’s time to use them to create your persona(s). You can use a digital persona generator, an Excel spreadsheet, a Google doc, or the old pen-and-paper method. 

No matter how you decide to do it, your persona(s) should include the following: 

• Demographics
• Motivations
• Ambitions
• Intentions
• Buzzwords
• Mannerisms
• Objections 
• Any messaging that resonates 

Difference between B2B and B2C personas

While the persona creation process is similar, the type of customers your business has makes a big difference. B2C businesses look at the kinds of people they sell to. B2B businesses look at the types of companies they sell to and the decision-makers within those businesses. Determining the persona type you need for your business will help you fine-tune your marketing and generate more sales. 

How Avista Can Help

If you need help creating customer personas or implementing them in your marketing tactics, Avista can help. We have the expertise to help your business achieve and exceed its marketing and PR goals.

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