If you’re serious about marketing that actually works, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to.
Some companies lose business because customers don’t feel a personal connection to the brand despite the product or service being useful. This can be avoided if businesses put in the effort to know their customers well and how to best communicate with them. In a marketing study by the Edelman Group, 51% of respondents expressed frustration with several brands’ efforts in understanding their needs.
A customer persona is a one-page representation of your ideal client. It’s a collection of demographics and a strategic empathy hack that helps you understand how your audience thinks, acts, and makes decisions. Through customer personas, brands can establish a strong foundation on which to build their branding, offerings, marketing efforts, and customer service.
A good persona focuses on:
- Psychographics & behaviors (What they care about, what drives them)
- Pain points (What keeps them up at night)
- Goals (What they’re trying to achieve)
- A single, specific identity (Not just “40-55-year-olds,” but “Susan, 51, an education consultant”)
Why Customer Personas Work
Humans are wired for empathy. A specific representation of a person, for example, “a 32-year-old single woman looking for quality clothing that is comfortable and meets her budget”, is more relatable than a general target audience portrayal saying, “millennial women”. Although customer personas represent a broad audience, the detailed characterization makes it easier to understand and cater to them.
Personas influence everything—copywriting, design, product development—by helping you speak directly to the right people in a way that resonates.
How to Create an Effective Customer Persona
Customer personas are only helpful if you know how to create and use them effectively. There’s no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” ideal customer. One persona isn’t enough—create at least two to account for different segments of your audience.
The Essentials
Customer personas vary from organization to organization. Generally, they entail descriptions that portray your target audience, which can include their occupation, industry, company size, pain points, goals, buying process, and other relevant information to your brand.
It might be tempting to classify them into groups based on the data you gathered, but it is more advantageous to get into the specifics of who they are. The descriptions in your customer persona should include:
- Demographics: What is their age, gender, marital status, and income?
- Professional details: Where do they work and in what industry?
- Psychographics: What is their personality like and what innate qualities do they have?
- Goals: What do they want to accomplish?
- Pain points: What are their frustrations?
- Benefits: How will your product or service solve their concerns?
- Influences: What media makes an impression on them?
- Buying process: How do they make purchasing decisions?
Need a template? Download ours!
Finding Persona Insights
A huge mistake in creating customer personas is leaving the identity of the customer to the imagination. You can’t guess your way to a great persona—you need data. Here’s where to dig:
The Client’s Website:
- Check success stories & case studies for real customer insights.
- Review website analytics to see who’s visiting and what they’re engaging with.
- Scan reviews for recurring themes and pain points.
Social Media:
- Identify engaged followers and analyze their profiles.
- Look for tags & mentions—who’s interacting with the brand?
- Analyze comments (both positive and negative) to spot trends.
Industry Research:
- Study competitors—who are they targeting, and how?
- Use tools like Google Trends, the U.S. Census Bureau, and audience analytics.
- Conduct customer interviews or surveys for direct insights.
Talk to the Client:
Ask them:
- “If you could clone one customer, who would it be?”
- “Are your current customers the ones you actually want?”
Consider Secondary Personas:
While the focus is to find and cater to the people who will most likely be consistent customers, you should take into consideration the other personas that may exist. This process can help you focus even more on who you really want to talk to, appeal to, or sell to.
- Influencers & Partners – These are people who make sales indirectly by influencing others to make a purchase. For example, a personal trainer may recommend a brand of shoes to gym members.
- Detractors – These are people who fit the persona that you built but have characteristics other than the descriptions that you made. While a part of them fits into your target audience, another part of them isn’t the right fit for your market.
- Anti-Personas – These are people who are not likely to make a purchase. For example, if your products or services are designed for women, then men are less likely to buy unless there’s a unique reason.
Your customer personas should demonstrate real people with real concerns, desires, and motivations. You don’t want to make rough sketches of who your customers are based on light observations and insufficient data.
Try developing your personas as early as possible so you can keep finding room to grow, serve your customers better, and find success in your business. Over time, you’ll gather more data on who your customers are and update your customer personas to reflect those new insights.
The Benefits of Customer Personas
Marketing without a clear target is like throwing darts in the dark—you might hit something, but it won’t be intentional. Without customer personas, your messaging is scattered, your brand feels disconnected, and you’re guessing what your audience actually wants. When you know exactly who you’re talking to, everything changes.
Stronger Branding
No matter how creative your logo, slogan, or piece of content may be, it doesn’t matter if the audience is not interested. You need to know what will resonate with them, not just what you think looks or sounds best. Personas can help you do that.
More Engaged Customers
Generic messages don’t move people. Your audience won’t be stirred into action when they read your message unless it focuses on the specific details that they care about. Having customer personas helps to shape language that will move the right audience.
Increased Loyalty
Customer personas help you build a brand that your target market can trust, making it easier to establish customer loyalty. Personas help you create content and experiences that make customers feel seen, understood, and valued.
Smarter Business Decisions
You can’t improve what you don’t understand. When you don’t know who your customers are, there is no way to know what their needs and preferences are. Their identity lays the groundwork for improving your existing offerings and creating new ones.
Need Help?
Now that you have all the information you need to get started, it’s time to narrow down who your real potential customers are! Need help defining your ideal customer? First Ascent can build data-driven personas that take the guesswork out of your marketing. Let’s chat!