How customer personas help define your target audience
If you can understand your top customers, you will be able to pinpoint their business pains, understand how they communicate and get on the right platforms to attract their attention.
It’s impossible to find out everything about every customer or prospect individually, but you can create a customer persona to represent your customer base.
A customer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona represents one fictional customer, not a group of people.
How To Build A Customer Persona
Have a look at who is already buying from you, following you, and interacting with your posts. When painting this picture of your target audience, note the following data points (with examples):
Age: Millennial / 38
Marital Status: Long Term Partner
Gender: Female
Education: BCIT E-Commerce
Children: None
Income: $90,000.00
Occupation: Project Manager
Personality: Ambivert
Home Ownership: Townhouse Owner
Start With Demographics
Basic demographics will help create a starting point for your persona. Try and provide as much detail as possible based on your market research.
Where in the world does your social media audience live? This helps you understand which geographic areas to target. Does your target audience include college students? New parents? Parents of teens? Retirees?
Psychographics Add Personal Detail
Next, psychographic data, such as interests and hobbies add more personal details to help form a better understanding of your customer prospects.
What does your target audience like to do? What TV shows do they watch? What other businesses do they interact with? What are the personal and business challenges they face in a day?
Understand Spending Behaviors
Finally, defining the users spending power and patterns allows us to understand purchasing behavior and estimated retail spending.
How much money does your target audience have to spend? How do they approach purchases in your price category? Do they have specific financial concerns or preferences you need to address? Do they purchase on the spot or take time to research before a purchase?
Put A Face To The Name
Now it’s time to give your customer a name and a face. This might be strange, but it will help crystalize the idea of the ‘human’ you will later create content and other marketing materials for. Browse through stock images and see if you can find a picture to associate with him. Do not use images of actual people, find AI-generated images of faces for privacy purposes. Try browsing https://generated.photos/ for ideas.
Paint A Picture With All The Parts
It’s time to gather all the data in one place and breath some life into this person. Create a short bio or “life story” for your customer persona. Explain how they have come to need your help. Many businesses have more than one customer segment they want to reach. Create a different customer persona for each of these segments.
The better you understand your target market, the more you’ll be able to focus ads and reach people who are most likely to convert into customers. This customer research will help you create resonating content, messaging, and ads. The next time you need to ask the question, “What does my customer want?”, ask your persona. Going through this process will give you valuable insights into how to create content that resonates with your target audience.
