Customer Personas: Putting a human face on customer data
We’ve talked a lot about identifying problems, and we talked a bit about the people you should be targeting. Now it’s time to really understand who your core customer is. As you complete your initial user research, you’ll be able to understand some basic stuff about your customers like their demographics, choices, behaviors, emotions, attitudes, and motivations (remember their jobs to be done?). You can then use all this information to craft your customer personas.
What is a customer persona?
A customer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It summarizes the key details of who your customer is - think of a customer persona like a dating profile of your typical customer. It’s putting a human face on your customer data.
Your persona will be a combination of who they are and their jobs to be done.
You will likely have several different customer personas for your business, and it’s your goal to identify the attributes that will help to predict their behavior (to ultimately convert them to your solution!). You can use your customer persona to identify marketing channels, value proposition messaging, sales tactics, feature development, and more.
Customer Persona Template
There are a plethora of customer persona templates available online. I like to use a combination of a traditional persona canvas and a jobs-to-be-done canvas.
Components of my customer persona template
Photo & Name: Include a photo of your ideal customer and their name
Archetype: character description, e.g. “frequent flier” or “selfless hero”
Demographics: statistically, who is this person, e.g. age, location, education
Jobs to be done: see more
One-line summary: summarize your persona in one sentence, e.g. “Katrina Anderson is a busy professional who is looking for an easier way to plan and book her business trips”
Short biography: context around who your person is
Personality traits: how would you describe their personality?
Behaviors/ habits: What does this person do? How do they act?
Channels: where can you reach (i.e. market to) this person, e.g. online, mobile, specific social media sites, at certain physical locations, etc.
Challenges/ frustrations/ anxieties: Simply put, what is their problem? What challenges do they have with their current situation? What anxieties would they have about changing their situation or using a new solution?
Motivations: What would motivate them to try a new solution? How would they prioritize features or benefits, e.g. price, convenience, etc.?
Alternative solutions: What are they currently using or what could they use to solve their problem?
In the next post, we’ll discuss how we can group different customer personas into target customer segments.
💡TLDR: It’s important to truly understand who your ideal customer is. Creating customer personas humanizes your customer data - it summarizes the key characteristics of your ideal customer.
📖 Exercise: Fill in a full customer persona template for each of your ideal customer types
📎 Download: Customer Persona Template
🚀 Group Access: Request access to my Entrepreneurs Group to receive more helpful content, special offers, and free access to my Founder Toolkit (including my Google Drive template!).
