What is a Customer Persona

 

A Customer Persona (or Buyer Persona) is an ideal customer's fictitious mock-up or template.This usually includes demographics (age, gender location and occupation) and psychographics (motivations, likes, dislikes, and their pain points). 
The practice of constructing fictional people based on your ideal customers characteristics allows your content marketing team to clearly define and segment them.

After all, you can't be all things to everyone. Concentrate on the types of people that match your product or service appropriately.

Here's an example Persona:

City Carl  

example persona

 

Here are some of the questions you should consider when developing buyer personas:

  • What is their demographic information?
    What is their job and seniority level?
  • What does a day in their life look like?
  • What are the pain points that bother them or they are looking to solve? How can you help them solve these?
  • What are their most important things they value? What are their goals?
  • Where are they going to get information?
  • What are their most common product or service objections to your offerings?

 

customer persona template

 


How many Personas Should You Create?

It really depends on how many customer types you are serving. But a great starting point is to target the first two or three that represent the majority of your sales.

A business like Samsung has so many products and services that they would need hundreds.

It typically is only between 3 and 5 that smaller, less complex companies require. How many classes or segments can you use to break down your customer base?

Build content as if you were speaking directly to your Persona.   

Whatever you want to express, visualize your message as if you were talking directly to the person in your persona while creating web pages, blogs, videos or presentations.


Market Segmentation

You may need to create multiple versions of the same content topics in order to enhance this content directly for each persona.

For each persona, content can be written and targeted in this specific way.

Imagine selling Grady White boats. Your market research tells you that 80% of all Grady White boats are sold to married men aged 32-49 years and single men aged 28-35 years.

Although the brand (Grady White) is the same, to resonate with each group you would need to create different marketing content tailored to them even if you are discussing the same model of Grady White boat because each segmented customer persona group may have different motivations and inspirations as well as needs.