What should be included in a customer persona? 16 Answers

Likes and Dislikes

These likes and dislikes should include the user’s preferred social media, websites, and browsers. Which labels do they like the most? When they shop, what do they typically buy? When designing a product, it’s helpful to be aware of the other brands your customer frequently uses. In other words, what kind of media do your consumers often consume? What kinds of books do they regularly enjoy reading?

Taking into account their preferences and habits might help you create a one-of-a-kind consumer persona. Depending on the scope of your project and your specific objectives, your user persona will take on a completely different form. Make sure your contribution enhances its overall value.

Potential Objections

When creating customer persona templates, one important thing to consider is what your customers may object to as you promote your products or services. For example, if you present a proposal that seems too good to be true, be prepared to back up your claims with sufficient evidence in case people in your target audience are skeptical and need more proof.

Having an idea of what customers could object to is essential to creating your customer persona templates because you cannot always assume that your target audience will buy into what you have to offer, even if you know they would benefit greatly from it.

Customer Journey Map

The one characteristic covered in a proper customer persona template is the customer journey map. Customer journey mapping is a technique that helps businesses understand their target customers’ behavior and their process of buying goods or services. It also helps them to target those customers at the right time and place in their journey. This is useful for businesses to understand their customers’ needs and optimize their sales and marketing strategies.

Strict Guidelines

Every business exists to make money, so knowing a person’s income level helps gauge if they can afford your products and services. Income always comes into play in my business. We target customers that not only have a steady income, but have maintained stable employment for two consecutive years.

It’s essential to mitigate risks by fully vetting our customers and their co-signers. Creating a detailed customer persona has helped my team successfully acquire the right customers based on a strict set of guidelines.

Media Consumption

Everyone knows about the standard customer persona characteristics, like age, demographic, and job. But there are other important elements to consider when creating a customer persona template, such as their favorite brands or how much/which media your potential customers consume. Media consumption is the determining factor telling you where and when you have to serve content to your target audience.

Profile Portrait

There is no substitute for pictures and images when it comes to conveying meaning. A persona can be made more relatable after a face has been given to it. You now have a far more complete picture of the potential benefits your design and goods can bring to this person’s life. Consider the user’s age, gender, and character when you frame the shot. Unsplash is a wonderful resource for locating free photos to utilize in your user persona. To get the pictures you need, just type in “persona” or some other description that fits your ideal user profile.

Geographic Location

The location of your consumer impacts various angles of the marketing process. For the most effective ad targeting, you’ll want to be as specific as possible about where your target audience lives—whether in a city, particular states in the U.S., or overseas. Marketing efforts need to be localized and centered around specific geographic locations to build a complete picture of your customer persona’s lifestyle, circumstances and purchasing decisions.

Pain Points

One characteristic that is essentially covered in any buyer persona is the pain points of the customer. Focusing on a customer’s recurring problems will give your company a clear understanding of what the customer wants and what they don’t pay attention to. It helps your company draft targeted messaging that will address the customer’s problems, which then positions your brand as the solution to those problems. This will not only allow you to get a deeper insight into your target audience, but will also help strategize and inform your marketing plan.

Customer’s To-Do List

Define the key tasks that need to be done for your customer to alleviate their most pressing problems, and achieve their most significant goals. If you can identify the specific daily, weekly, and monthly items on their to-do list—you can find your way in to help. Knowing what the customer’s average day and week looks like, task-wise, provides fodder for every targeted marketing material and refines your product roadmap.

Purchasing Power and Patterns

Always include your customer’s spending power and patterns. You want to know how much your target audience usually spends on products similar to yours and how they spend it. Do they make one large purchase every year or smaller purchases throughout the year? Do they have a large or limited budget? Do they hunt for discounts? These are all questions that you must ask and then find answers to when creating a customer persona template.

Interests and Hobbies

Every marketing operation depends on the customer persona, as any marketing plan is ultimately based on customers, both current and potential. One of the key social traits that make up a customer persona is their interests. Knowing about general interests and hobbies helps you find the right focus for your marketing plan.

If the now-famous demos and interviews didn’t provide you with this kind of knowledge, you can always depend on social media monitoring and analytics tools. Along with other audience analytics, these tools provide information on the interests of both current and potential customers, enabling you to find your ideal customers with the least amount of work. Brandwatch is one such tool I would recommend.

Demographics

Customer personas should incorporate demographic information about your target audience in addition to other fundamentals. Character development is enhanced when you use real-world data like age, gender, income, education, geography, and other demographics. Additionally, this will aid in the process of creating distinct client personas.

Customer Goals

Customer or User Personas can, if misused, be fluffy and lacking in useful details. To make sure you’re getting value from these personas, the one aspect you must include is the customer’s goals. That is, what are they trying to achieve by using your service or that of a competitor? All too often though, customer goals lack real-world credibility.

Make sure to conduct primary qualitative research in the form of customer interviews or similar surveys to really understand what it is your customers are trying to achieve. Don’t skip the hard work, otherwise, your persona won’t match up to reality.

Customer’s Values

In a day and age where social causes are taking forefront, it’s crucial to understand and include your customers’ core values in the customer persona template. This is critical information to consider, as it can decide what your communication style, social marketing strategy, product contents, packaging and more should be. Whatever your brand may be, it’s undeniably important to know what your values are in reference to that of your target audience to be as successful as possible long term.

Purchasing Habits

The customer’s purchasing habits. This means who they’re typically shopping for, how frequently they’re making a purchase, and in what price range they’re shopping within. Your customer base can typically fit within a handful of persona templates, and this particular characteristic will help you predict this customer’s future purchases and can assist in your buying efforts.

Personality

To fully realize your user persona and make informed design decisions, it’s helpful to describe or demonstrate their potential personality. You can utilize something as simple as bullet points, or you can incorporate more complex components like an interactive slider scale. Personality tests like the Myers-Briggs can be used to provide insight into your clientele, or you can simply provide a full description of who they are.