Defining personas for your customers is crucial for any marketing strategy. 

When you create a buyer persona, you begin to understand the motives that will lead your ideal customer to purchase your product. 

By developing marketing strategies with a customer persona in mind, you’re able to get to know your ideal customer – even if you haven’t had the chance to meet them face to face in real life.

Here’s everything you need to know about defining your ideal customer persona and how to create content with them in mind.

10 Steps to Defining Personas

Now that you understand the importance of developing a customer persona, it’s time to dig in and get started.

• Step 1: Understand their pain points and challenges.
• Step 2: Flesh out their professional life.
• Step 3: Determine your customer persona’s values and principles.
• Step 4: Figure out what motivates your persona.
• Step 5: Think through the process of the questions your customer persona asks when deciding whether to make a purchase.
• Step 6: Decide where your customer persona gets their news and other forms of media.
• Step 7: Imagine what it’s like to spend a day in the life of your customer persona.
• Step 8: Consider your customer’s career path: how did they end up in their current line of work?
• Step 9: Imagine what type of education could have led your customer persona to the lifestyle they have today.
• Step 10: Nail down the personal demographics of the person you’ve created through the customer persona visualization process. Be sure to include their family structure, where they live, their gender, their age, their household income, and their relationship status.

It can take some time to create the perfect customer persona for your company. 

And, honestly, research is your friend here. Skipping steps or relying on just gut feeling will almost always lead to a persona that’s closer to wishful thinking than reality. Spend some time digging into interviews or actual customer data—those small details can reveal a lot about motivations and quirks you’d never have guessed. Some marketers even keep a “persona journal” to jot down fresh insights as they arise during campaigns. That kind of ongoing record-keeping sounds tedious, but it actually comes in handy when you revise personas down the road.

It’s also normal to go back to the drawing board and tweak your customer persona details as you learn more about your target market. 

The more you envision what your ideal customer looks like, the better you’ll be able to determine the best way to market to your target market.

Once you’ve nailed down most details and actually put a name and a face (even if it’s just a stock photo, I won’t tell) to your persona, you may start to notice your messaging getting sharper—less generic, more on point. The catch is that even your most “finished” persona will get outdated, sometimes much faster than you think. You’ll spot it when you suddenly realize your emails are falling flat or ads aren’t getting clicks like they did last quarter. Point being, stick with agility: update, toss out old ideas, and keep your finger on the pulse.

Creating Personas: Your Key to Creating Relevant Content

When creating an accurate picture of the audience you’re trying to reach through your marketing campaign, you’re able to draw your audience into what you have to offer. 

This can be a key component of an inbound marketing plan and can help your target audience feel like they mesh with what your brand has to offer.

Generate More Accurate Buyer Personas

If you’re ready to move forward and create buyer personas that drive your company’s growth, we’re here to help.