How to Develop Your Ideal Customer Personas

Developing your customer personas is essential for effective online marketing campaigns. The customer persona profile acts as a means of bridging the gap between company and customer, it helps you provide better customer service and it gives insights as to where your target customers are spending time online. It is an excellent lead generation tool because you’ll be asking useful questions as you learn more about your prospects and customers.

However, these benefits won’t drive traffic to your site or convert sales if you’re not doing it correctly. Developing a customer persona is an exacting, challenging process that requires you to step out of your shoes and into someone else’s. You may not have anything in common with this persona, yet you need to feel their pain and determine what they want to see. Some proven tactics on creating a customer persona can help you through the process. 

Collect Your Data

• Study Your Website’s Analytics. Gather information on unique visitor trends and find out where your prospects were before they landed on your page. Also, find out how long these users are lingering on your webpage. You might need to address your bounce rate if they’re leaving after less than a minute.

• Make Note of Themes. You’re likely to encounter certain trends as you’re looking through your metrics, such as the appearance of geographic search terms or the order that your visitors are viewing different pages. These are useful when developing a customer persona, as you can identify and focus on behavior. 

• Review Keyword Phrases. Your website analytics will include the keyword phrases that visitors use when seeking information from the major search engines. You’ll see certain trends begin to develop, such as words, geographic descriptions, and preferences. These are helpful in developing a customer persona because you can identify the problems they need solved, the questions they want answered and even where they’re located.

• Talk to Existing Customers. What better way to create a customer persona than speaking with those who purchased from your company before? Most customers are willing to take a short poll or have a brief telephone conversation, especially if you offer an incentive such as discounts or other perks.

Build a Basic Profile

Once you’ve gathered the key data about your audience and prospect behaviors you can use the information to create customer personas. Sort through the demographic information, keyword phrases and visitor trends to compile a spreadsheet and organize these details. Developing a customer persona starts with the collection of data that will be filtered to formulate personalities and habits. 

Ask the Right Questions

It may be time consuming but getting down to the minute character traits of your potential customers will give you an edge over your company's competitors. In essence, developing a customer persona involves an amateur psychoanalysis of the ideal prospect that’s seeking your product or service. Finding out what makes them tick enables you to direct your marketing efforts with a more accurate and straightforward approach. Promoting your company online won’t do you any good if the right audience isn’t listening.

Here is a checklist of questions to help get you started with building your customer/buyer persona profiles:

1. What is their demographic information?

2. What is their job and level of seniority?

3. What does a day in their life look like?

4. What are their pain points?

What do you help them solve?

5. What do they value most?
What are their goals?

6. Where do they go for information?

7. What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?

8. What are their most common objections to your product or service?