What should be included in a customer persona?
What is a customer persona template? What should be in a persona template? Here’s 16 answers from marketing experts and business leaders.
- Likes and Dislikes
- Potential Objections
- Customer Journey Map
- Strict Guidelines
- Media Consumption
- Profile Portrait
- Geographic Location
- Pain Points
- Customer’s To-Do List
- Purchasing Power and Patterns
- Interests and Hobbies
- Demographics
- Customer Goals
- Customer’s Values
- Purchasing Habits
- Personality
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.
Daniel Foley, Director of Marketing, SEO Stack
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.
Nick Shackelford, Managing Partner, Structured Agency
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.
Matthew Ramirez, Founder, Paraphrase Tool
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.
Jae Pak, MD, Jae Pak MD Medical
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.
Salman Aslam, Managing Director, Omnicore
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.
Daniel Close, CEO & Founder, We Buy Houses in Kentucky
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.
Breanne Millette, CEO, BISOULOVELY
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.
Madhurima Halder, Content Manager, Recruit CRM
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.
Brian Casel, Founder, ZipMessage
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.
Christian Kjaer, CEO & Co-Founder, ElleVet
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.
Louis Russell, Content Manager, Kuhamia
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.
Kyle Basett, Chief Operating Officer, Altitude Control
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.
Angus Carbarns, Digital Strategy Consultant, We Are Engines
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.
Asma Hafejee, Senior Marketing Executive, CMR Surgical
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.
Nabiha Akhtar, CEO/Founder, Lil Deenies
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.
Bram Jansen, Co-Founder, vpnAlert
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