The following is a guest post by Cherryl Pereira, Head of Content at Chisel Labs
Customer personas are a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
It can be based on an actual person or it can be made up, as long as you know the characteristics that this persona has and what type of content they would enjoy reading.
A well-crafted customer persona will help you create engaging content for your blog posts and social media posts, which in turn will make them more appealing to potential customers.
This post will provide a complete overview of how to create great customer personas for your business.
What are customer personas?
What are the benefits of customer personas?
How to create interesting customer personas: step-by-step guide.
Conclusion
What are customer personas?
Customer personas are a fictional representation of your ideal customer. They are a combination of demographics, background, and goals that give you an insight into the people who will benefit from using your product or service.
What are the benefits of customer personas?
– Understanding how each persona interacts with your business allows you to design better products for them.
– Developing personas gives everyone in your company common ground on which they can communicate about customers
– The more specific you get when creating personas, the easier it is to develop messaging that resonates with different segments of potential customers.
– Personas help you prioritize features and updates because you can focus on what matters most to your personas.
-They help you sell your customers by investing in your product early on and help you avoid wasting time building features that don’t solve a problem your persona has
– Also, they help marketing teams to spread the word about what matters for their potential customer base. It’s much easier to say “We have this new feature because we know everyone who belongs to our Persona X LOVES it” than “we think there is a lot of value in this product.
How to create interesting customer personas: step-by-step guide.
Step #01: Identify the problem you’re trying to solve
For each persona that we create, we want to be sure that they are very specific. Analogy wise, you need to value the prop you are promoting.
As such we need to identify exactly what problem(s) or value prop(s) we’re trying to solve through our messaging and marketing efforts.
This is why creating a few potential personas before diving into any design processes will allow you to hone in on who these customer segments truly need your products/services to benefit them.
If you try too hard to capture every persona’s needs you may find yourself catering to no one.
Step #02: Create realistic scenarios around each customer persona
Next, we need to create realistic scenarios that illustrate the problem(s) or value prop(s) we identified in Step #01. If our personas are too broad then there is just not enough context given and any messaging will be ineffective at best.
These contextualized scenarios should pinpoint– exactly what might hold these specific types of users back from achieving their goals (the problems they need to be solved).
It also illuminates what differentiates each persona apart from others which helps ensure your content marketing efforts aren’t all sounding like carbon copies of each other! This step requires some critical thinking and we’ll use the following template to help you get started:
– [scenario title](link) – [description of what is happening] – [problem(s)] (e.g., when this happens, how does it make you feel? What might be holding back your ability to solve this problem?) – [suggested solution] (e.g., A New York Times article suggests X as a potential strategy for overcoming this issue)
A customer persona is the archetypical user of your product or service and it’s usually based on market research, sales data. Also, some conjecture around who you think will be most likely to use what you’re selling.
At its core, it should describe how real people might interact with your business — ideally in their own words — while highlighting commonalities between different types of users so that problem/solution scenarios can naturally emerge from them.
It also helps marketing teams come up with content ideas they know are going to resonate well with key audiences.
This template outlines everything we need:
– [customer profile]
– [user goals & challenges]
– [solutions/benefits of product or service for this audience]
– [company core values]
Step #03: Brainstorm customer persona details
The third step is to brainstorm details that further flesh out your personas.
– [company core value] is reflected in ____ product or service feature(s) you offer/offerings to this audience, and why.
– For _____ persona: what is the most important thing they do with our product? What problems does it solve for them? How would their work be harder without this product?
– [company core value] is reflected in ____ company and/or brand attribute(s), and why. Examples: we are a fast-growing start-up; branded as “the luxury hotel search engine” because our design skews toward the well-heeled traveler, etc.
Step #04: Create customer personas
You can use the information you’ve gathered to create a list of three to five potential customer personas. The more detail, the better! If you have less than 100 prospective customers, this is an excellent tool for creating detailed persona profiles.
Then compare your new data against existing market research on your target audience. Both sets will likely provide useful insights into how certain types of people behave online.
What’s more, it’ll help you find holes in what little data may already exist on some demographics to your business model. This is exactly what great marketers should be doing.
Step #05: List potential obstacles to success and plan for them in advance
One of the most important steps in creating your marketing plan is to identify potential issues that could hinder its effectiveness.
For example, if you’re trying to increase traffic or leads for a new website, be sure to consider whether any technical hurdles need addressing before you begin implementing your strategy.
Obstacles can also include problems within departments like sales and customer support. It’s critical to spend some time talking with key stakeholders upfront about what they expect.
This will help ensure everyone involved has realistic expectations when it comes time for them to deliver results.
Step #06: Keep your team informed
Make sure all members on the project team know exactly what their roles are, and how they fit into achieving company goals.
Communication is very important regardless of the size of your company. The more open and transparent everyone can be, the better results they’ll achieve in a shorter amount of time.
Step #07: Communicate all project updates on time
Make sure everyone knows about changes, issues, and potential problems before they happen.
If you have a challenging client or customer that is causing delays, be proactive in communicating directly so that it doesn’t affect other members of the team.
Conclusion
So in a nutshell they are extremely beneficial. They help you understand your customers, what they need and why.
They also help you understand how to sell the right products at the right time to the right person.
Before creating customer personas, it’s worth researching properly first to give a better idea of who your ideal client is.
Cherryl Pereira is the Head of Content at Chisel. Chisel Labs is a premiere agile product management software company that brings together roadmapping, team alignment, and customer connection.
