How to Create a Customer Persona

Greetings! This week’s video how-to answers a reader question:  “How do I create a customer persona?” Creating a customer persona is a fundamental step that is often overlooked by businesses both large and small.

Join Heather as she explains the purpose of developing a customer persona, as well as how to go about it:

When your prospects read your online copy, there’s only one thing they want to know:  “What’s in it for me?”

The purpose of creating a customer persona is to get to know the person who is reading your stuff or buying from you.  And at the end of the day, what matters to that person is what is in it for me? So everything you write – be it sales copy, blog, or article – should be targeted to your customer persona. The “what’s in it for me?” customer question is the essential one you need to answer.

• And then you need to consider that you’re looking at different types of folks who may be visiting your site, reading your content, or considering buying your products or services.

An explicit example:  Would you “sell” the same way to these 35-year-old guys?

A lot of folks will claim that they have a product or service that appeals to everyone, so they can’t write copy specific to any one persona.

Well, consider this example of two 35-year-old men:

• Customer Persona #1/Momma’s Guy:  He lives at home with his mom, enjoys ham radios and bagpipes, reads magazines about military history, and dates maybe once a year.
• Customer Persona #2/Metro Guy:  Lives in a downtown condo, enjoys scotch and fine dining, reads exotic travel magazines, and dates several times a month.

So would you write the same for them?  No, probably not.  Each guy has different hopes, fears, desires, pain points, and objections to overcome.

This example speaks to the importance of creating a customer persona.  When writing online content, you’ll want to delve deeper into your readers’ persona.

Some Questions to Ask When Developing a Customer Persona

There are a lot of questions that you need to ask at the very beginning of the process when creating a customer persona.

If you’re a freelance writer, one of the first questions to ask your client is if you can view their customer persona documents so that you can capture the reader you’re writing for. Or, if you’re working in-house and don’t have access to customer persona profiles, then this presents a great opportunity to go back and revisit your copy to discover what content is really resonating with your readers.

A list of questions to start out with are:

1. Do you have multiple target audiences?  (As referenced before, Constant Contact does a fabulous job of segmenting verticals on their landing page).
2. How old is your typical buyer/reader?
3. What level of education have they reached?
4. What are their average income levels?
5. What benefits are important to them?  (What is important to one 35-year-old guy may be irrelevant to another, as noted above).
6. What magazines do they read?
7. What sites do they visit and trust?
8. What objections do you need to overcome in the copy?

In the end, you want to know your customer persona like you know your best friend. Your copy will resonate with the customer, and convert!