How to create customer personas?

Creating customer personas can help you better understand and empathize with your target audience. The process begins with researching and identifying who your customers are. Then you group similar customers together and create a customer persona to represent each group.

Introduction to customer personas

Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. 

Customer personas can help you focus on creating marketing materials for the people who are most likely to buy your products or services.

Most businesses have more than one type of customer, so they typically create multiple customer personas to accurately capture their target audience. Each customer persona represents an individual from one of the organization’s target groups. A target group is a set of people who have similar interests, goals, or concerns. 

In a later activity, you’ll practice creating two customer personas.

What’s included in a customer persona

Although some templates for customer personas can be longer and more complex, the template you’ll use in this course is a simple one. It includes three basic components:

1. Who: Provide a short description of the fictional person that includes their name, age, location, household, and education. You’ll also include a photo. These details make it easier to imagine someone who represents an actual customer.
2. Goals: Describe what the person wants to achieve. This might include several related goals that apply to the customer’s life and your products or services.
3. Barrier: Identify a pain point that prevents the person from achieving their goals.

Although it’s not required for the personas you’ll create in this course, it may be helpful to include more information. For example, you could include a detailed description of the individual’s personality, hobbies, values, and lifestyle. Including more information can help you understand the customer better.

Researching your customers

Creating an accurate customer persona begins with research. You’ll need data about your customers, including demographics like age, location, household, education, and occupation. You’ll also need data that describes your customers’ goals and barriers (or pain points).

Companies gather this type of data using analytics tools, customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, and other research methods.

Here are some examples of questions you might ask to gather customer data:

• What is your age?
• What is your education level?
• Where do you live?
• Whom do you live with?
• What is your occupation?
• What are your primary activities on a typical workday? What about on the weekend?
• What challenges do you face?
• What do you value most?
• What are your goals?

The questions you ask should also be tailored specifically to address your company’s products or services. 

After you gather and compile all the data, you’ll need to organize it by finding trends and grouping similar answers together. Then, based on the data collected, you can create fictional personas that represent each target group in your target audience.

Here is an example of how you might organize your customer data in a spreadsheet:

	A	B	C	D	E	F
1	Name	Age	Location	Occupation	Education	Values
2	Francis	26	Suburbs	Store manager	High school	Community involvement
3	Deepak	22	City	Teacher	College	Volunteering
4	Linda	31	Suburbs	Realtor	College	Networking
5	Shanika	28	Suburbs	Accountant	High school	Volunteering
6	Louis	38	City	Hotel manager	College	Community involvement

Customer persona examples

The following examples represent customer personas for a company that sells camping tents, which is one of the examples used in a video. Based on the company’s research, they found that a majority of their customers were parents or guardians in their mid-30s to mid-50s with two or three children. They also researched the goals and barriers for their customers and found that customers fit into several different groups based on their answers. They used the information from this research to create a customer persona that represents each group.