What Is a Customer Persona?

Every company operating in some field must organize a marketing campaign that attracts customers to it and grows its sales — and this campaign includes many forms of content. But if it tries to market to all audiences with this content, it won’t get the engagement it aspires to.

They have to gather information about their target audience and understand what their needs and desires are and what matters to them being in the product. By analyzing this information they build what’s known as the customer persona model — this model gives them a picture of the ideal customer they should keep in view when producing marketing content.

In this article we’ll cover the concept of the customer persona model, its importance, and the data sources that go into its design.

What Is a Customer Persona?

Also called the Buyers’ Persona model — a precise description of an imagined person. This person represents the audience the company targets with its marketing campaigns. This model is prepared based on extensive research into the market and into the company’s customer base, plus some additional assumptions.

Small companies usually start with a single customer persona model that represents their customer base — but many companies may need more than one, especially if they offer many types of products and services, and have a wide fan base.

The practice of preparing a customer persona model has become essential for every company — especially for companies that follow an Inbound Marketing strategy. This type of strategy relies on carefully preparing marketing and knowledge content to attract the right audience segment.

Building the customer persona model starts with giving this persona identifying information such as: name, nationality, age group, gender, income level, field, marital status, and other personal information — but all of that is merely surface information, and this persona’s description must be deepened.

By including details like interests, goals, pain points, behavior patterns, buying habits, aspirations, desires, and beliefs, the picture becomes clearer. The more detailed this model is, the more precise the targeting of people similar to this model who match the ideal customer image.

The Importance of a Customer Persona Model

There are several factors that make building a customer persona model essential for any marketing campaign, including:

First: Helping With Product Development

Properly understanding the target audience doesn’t just contribute to preparing marketing materials to attract the customer — it plays a significant role in developing production and making improvements to the product to serve the consumer optimally.

By properly understanding the customer’s nature, needs, desires, and pain points, companies can produce products designed specifically for these customers and their needs — thus growing sales — in addition to making adjustments and additions based on the criticism and feedback they receive from consumers.

Second: Adding a Personal Touch and Building Relationships With Customers

Adding a personal touch to marketing materials — such as emails, for example — has a significant impact on customers, increases their repeat purchases, raises the recurring-customer rate, and helps with customer retention. All of that is done by relying on a precise customer persona model.

The customer persona model helps build long-term relationships with customers, which every company needs. When a company cares about the needs and problems of these customers, they’ll notice and appreciate this effort — and this will grow their trust in the product and their sense of connection to the brand.

Third: Preparing Effective Marketing Campaigns

Building a precise customer persona model helps identify the best channels for focusing marketing efforts and getting a better result. Does the ideal customer use their email daily? Then it’s a good idea to invest in an email marketing campaign. Where does the target audience get information from most?

As for social media platforms — is the targeted customer from the new generation (Gen Z)? Then marketing on TikTok or Instagram is useful. Are they from an older generation (Gen X)? Facebook is an excellent choice.

Also, a good understanding of this customer helps discover the keywords they use in their search for information, and thus they can be used in preparing content for search engines (SEO).

Fourth: A Better Understanding of Customers

The customer persona model is essential for understanding customers’ way of thinking and their behavior patterns, which helps prepare content, tone of voice, and marketing messages more attractive to customers’ interest and better meeting their needs.

By answering questions like: what social media platforms does the targeted customer use? Where do they get their information from, and what topics spark their interest? — we have a better understanding of the customer’s behavior pattern. This strategy is called Behavioral Targeting, and it helps prepare more effective marketing campaigns.

The Benefits of a Customer Persona Model

On top of everything above, there are several other benefits to adopting a customer persona model:

First: Higher Return On Investment

Precision in detailing the customer persona model helps grow the efficiency of the marketing efforts. It’s a guide that helps focus efforts in the right place and avoids wasting time and resources on ineffective channels — so we get targeting of the customers most likely to become recurring, and growth in sales and return on investment.

Second: Generating Customer Promoters for the Company

Every company aspires to gain loyal customers who shop from its store for years, promote it on social media platforms, and recommend it to their acquaintances — but the challenge lies in gaining this type of customer. Here the role of the customer persona model comes in. By adopting a precise model for this customer segment, the company can develop products and prepare content that speaks to every customer need, wins their trust, and builds this kind of relationship between the company and its customers.

Third: Better Segmentation of the Customer Base

Some companies — especially large ones — have a wide range of targeted customers, each with their own interests and message tone they respond to. So it doesn’t make sense to treat all these customers the same way. Here the importance of segmenting the customer base shows.

By preparing more than one customer persona model, the company can care for the various types of customers based on their backgrounds and the stage they’re going through in the sales funnel and their journey with the company — and prepare marketing materials more matched to and attractive to customers’ interest.

Fourth: Making It Easier to Convince Customers

The customer persona model acquaints us with the customer’s desires and pain points. That way we can anticipate the problems that may hinder the sales process and cause the customer to hesitate, and solve them in marketing materials — whether articles, ads, or emails — thus increasing the click-through rate and the conversion rate.

What Is a Negative Buyer Persona?

Just as the customer persona model is a representation of the ideal customer, the negative buyer persona is a description of the customer who doesn’t fit the company’s targeting.

A customer can fall under the negative persona classification for several reasons, including:

• High acquisition cost for this customer. The reason for that can be a low sale-price rate, a weak likelihood of repeat purchases, or a high likelihood of bouncing.
• Customers who deal with the company only for the free features, or to benefit from free content for knowledge and research.
• Customers with limited income who can’t afford the cost of the company’s products.
• Advanced customers who look for products or services above the level the company offers.

In short, having a customer persona model backed by a negative persona helps identify the customer types suitable and unsuitable for the company’s industry, and focus efforts in the place that yields better results. 

Steps for Creating a Customer Persona Model

Building the customer persona model requires some study and effort. Among the wrong practices is looking for ready templates from other companies and adopting them — every company has its own market, and it must invest the time and effort to build models specific to it. This build process goes through the following stages:

First: Audience Research and Data Gathering

There are many methods for gathering data on the target audience — chief among them research, surveys, and interviews. The primary source of this information is the base of customers who made purchases in the past, plus prospects and any other people who may match the type of target audience — in addition to previous customers who may be dissatisfied, since this type sheds light on what can be improved in the future.

Audience research is done by looking into the customer base and finding the channels customers use to get their information from, and the customers who follow the company on social media platforms — and by researching what competing companies do, the nature of the audience they target, and the practices they apply to attract customers.

Landing pages that gather data from visitors can also be leveraged, along with speaking with the sales team who deals directly with customers to get any information that may be useful in building the customer persona model.

As for surveys and interviews, the size of the form that gets filled must be suitable — enough to get a sufficient amount of information without causing user frustration. Free incentives can also be used to encourage the user to complete the survey.

The questions asked in surveys and interviews should cover the following fields:

• Demographics: such as age, gender, place of residence, education level, occupation, information about the company they work at, and more.
• Personal information: What is the income level? What are their goals, pain points, and challenges they face? What are the points that decide their opinion on buying a product or not? What grabs their attention to a certain brand? How can the company’s product help solve their problems?
• Information about how they receive content and news: What social media platforms do they use? What type of content do they prefer? What topics spark their interest?

After conducting many interviews and research, we have a large amount of raw data that requires analysis and study to turn it into an understandable, valuable form.

Second: Data Analysis

After finishing the interviews and collecting all this data from users, we look for the common things repeatedly mentioned by a large segment of people, and the patterns of answers that became familiar after a number of interviews.

At this stage, more than one customer persona model can be created by dividing users into several groups based on the common denominators between them — such as: job title, or the challenges and difficulties they share.

It isn’t necessary to have several models for every company. Any startup can start with one model and care to prepare it — and over time, as the company grows, they’ll notice new consumer patterns and prepare models for the personas of each.

Third: Creating the Model

Now everything above is turned into an imagined person and given personal information including a name, personal photo, occupation, and place of residence. Then fields are set aside for expanding on describing this person — these fields include behavior patterns, hobbies, goals, and challenges. The more we expand on the description and detail about this person, the more precise targeting and the better products and marketing materials we get.

Fourth: Using the Model and Benefiting From It

Once the customer persona model is ready, it’s time to put it to work. By presenting the model to the marketing team, more interactive and effective content can be prepared, the channels the ideal customer is present on can be identified, and efforts focused in the right place to get the highest engagement rate and raise the conversion rate.

As for the sales team, the customer persona model will give them a picture of the customer they’re speaking with. Their efforts and approach will be more efficient and effective thanks to their understanding of the customer, what they suffer from, and what they want to hear — and thus this will reflect positively on sales and profits.

Common Mistakes When Creating a Customer Persona Model

• Creating too many or too few models: too many models may exhaust the team and scatter efforts, while a small number may not cover every type of potential customer. For startups it’s better to start with one or two models and grow this number as the company’s size and range of products offered grow.
• Relying on assumptions more than real data: many companies make the mistake of relying on intuition, opinion, or outdated information instead of doing the necessary research. Real people should be surveyed and interviews conducted to get valuable, usable data about the target audience.
• Interviewing the wrong people: interviews with random people will produce random results. The type of customers the company wants to work with must be identified, starting with the current customer base and expanding to potential customers for greater coverage.
• Focusing on demographic and personal information at the expense of challenges and problems: taking personal and general information about customers is essential for building the customer persona model, but focusing on that misses the primary goal of this process — knowing the difficulties customers face and offering solutions to them.
• Not updating the customer persona models periodically: the world, the economy, what’s trending, and the market are all in a state of constant change. Customer persona models may become outdated, and relying on them lowers marketing efficiency. One recommendation is reviewing these models yearly and making adjustments to them when needed.

An Example of a Customer Persona Model

We have a company that operates in the field of selling athletic clothing and footwear. It created a customer persona model called Adam Arnold:

• Personal information: Adam is a single young man 25 years old, living in a studio apartment in New York, working as an office employee, with an annual income of $70,000.
• Hobbies: Adam is very passionate about sports and goes to the gym daily to keep in shape. He spends his free time on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
• Goals: Adam aspires to become a sports influencer on Instagram, and to get an additional income from influence on this platform.
• Challenges and pain points: Living in New York is expensive. Apartment rent, bills, and life basics drain a significant part of his income. He needs fashion-forward athletic clothing that helps him in the influencer journey he aspires to, of suitable quality, at acceptable prices.
• The appropriate marketing move: leveraging the social platforms we mentioned by offering deals on eye-catching clothing and footwear, suitable for an influencer who wants to take photos and videos and post them on Instagram, at prices affordable by the ordinary consumer.

Frequently Asked Questions – FAQ

Some frequently asked questions about the customer persona model:

Do Small Companies Need a Customer Persona Model?

Some may believe that the customer persona model is a practice only large companies follow, but the reality is that even small companies need a customer persona model. Every company wants to attract customers, and that can’t be done without a deep understanding of the nature of the target audience regardless of the field.

How Many Customer Persona Models Should Be Created?

It depends entirely on the company and the range of products it offers — a company can have one model or ten. It’s better for startups building these models for the first time to start with one or two, and as their size and customer base grow, they can then work on creating more models to cover every type of customer.