Building Customer Personas: A Guide for Businesses (+ Template)

Creating detailed customer personas is essential for tailoring your marketing strategies and ensuring your content resonates with your audience. In this guide, we’ll explore how to build customer personas and why they are crucial for the success of any marketing.

Trust me, you don’t want to skip this step of your marketing journey - you’ll be saving yourself from a lot of future pain.

Key Summary

• Get a customer persona template to use for your business

• Learn how to build customer personas

• Review current best customers and ideal customers.

• Conduct interviews and surveys.

• Utilise AI tools like ChatGPT and Hedgehog’s custom GPT.

• Why build personas?

• Simplify strategy, channel, and tactic selection.

• Build content for personas, not for yourself.

Use our Customer Persona Template

We’ve built this template by working with hundreds of different businesses and highlighting what we believed to be the most important focuses from each template we evaluated. If you are keen to get started, check out our customer persona template here and simply make a copy for yourself. Everything in the below steps will relate to this (or any other template) you use to structure your personas. We’ve also put together a custom GPT using AI to build personas for you.

How to Build Customer Personas

Review Your Current Best Customers

Start by analysing your existing customer base - these are your current customers paying for your services. You want to find more customers like them, right? 

Identify the characteristics of your most loyal and profitable customers. Look at demographic data (e.g. location, age, income, job title, etc.), purchasing behaviour, and feedback to understand what makes them valuable. Plug as much as you can in about them into your customer persona template.

Set Your Ideal Customers

Okay, now you’re changing your focus to new customers. Who would you like to attract? Define your ideal customers based on your business goals. Consider factors such as age, gender, location, income, interests, and challenges. This helps in targeting similar individuals who haven’t yet discovered your brand.

Interview and Survey Your Customers

Directly engaging with your customers provides deeper insights. Conduct interviews and surveys to gather qualitative data. Ask about their preferences, pain points, and what they value most in your product or service. This information is invaluable in creating accurate personas.

Use your Intuition

Use your own critical thinking to brainstorm and identify who your customer personas are and fill in each element of the persona. Armed with an indisputably close understanding of your customers and your business, you are in the box seat to put together some customer personas and fill in each element of the format.

Use AI Tools

Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT and Hedgehog’s Custom GPT to analyse customer data and generate personas. These tools can process large datasets quickly, providing patterns and insights that might not be immediately obvious. 

What’s the Hedgehog GPT you ask? It’s a custom trained GPT that we made to pump out personas for our clients. And now, it’s yours too! If you’ve got Chat GPT Plus you can access it here.

Why Build Customer Personas?

Simplifies Strategy and Tactics

Customer personas make it easier to choose the right strategies, channels, and tactics for your marketing efforts. By understanding your audience’s preferences and behaviours and where they spend their time, you can tailor your approach to meet their needs more effectively.

Build Content for Personas, Not Yourself

Creating content with your customer personas in mind ensures that your messaging resonates with your audience. Instead of guessing what your customers might like, you can develop content that addresses their specific interests and pain points, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

Conclusion

Building customer personas is a vital step in developing a successful marketing strategy. By understanding who your customers are and what they need, you can create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. Start by reviewing your current and ideal customers, engage with them directly through interviews and surveys, and utilise AI tools for deeper insights. 

Remember, well-crafted personas help you build content that truly resonates with your audience.

FAQ

What is a customer persona?

A customer persona is a detailed profile of a segment of your target audience, including demographic information, interests, behaviours, and pain points.

How often should I update my customer personas?

Regular updates are recommended, especially when you notice significant changes in customer behaviour or market trends. Annual reviews are a good practice.

Can I have more than one customer persona?

Yes, most businesses have multiple personas to represent different segments of their audience. Each persona should be unique and based on distinct characteristics and behaviours. When getting started with personas we typically recommend to build out 2-3 to get started with. You can always build more, but the more you build the more complex your marketing will become.

This guide is written by Hedgehog, a Done With You digital marketing consultancy specialising in small and medium businesses in Australia. We offer digital marketing consulting, coaching, and training.