Creating Effective Customer Personas for Digital Marketing Success

Customer personas or buyer personas are representations of ideal customers, providing a glimpse into the characteristics of the target audience. These personas help in better understanding potential customers and crafting personalized content tailored to specific needs, responses, and interests of different customer groups.

The most powerful customer personas are created by collecting and analyzing data from actual customers through surveys, interviews, and market research, reflecting insights into real customers.

How many customer personas are ideal?

Depending on the business maturity level, you can have 1-2 personas or even 10+ personas. However, it is advisable to start with fewer personas when using them for the first time.

If you aim to personalize marketing at a granular level, you should be able to develop marketing personas as needed. 

What are Negative Personas?

Customer personas represent the ideal buyer customers. On the other hand, Negative Personas represent people who are not desired as customers.

Here are some typical types:

1) Experts who are too advanced for your product/service:

These experts are overly demanding and difficult to satisfy, leading to ineffective marketing and sales outcomes.

2) Content hunters seeking knowledge/research:

Primarily students without purchase intent.

3) Potential customers demanding excessive cost concessions:

They seek excessive discounts, resulting in low sales prices and a tendency to switch brands frequently.

4) Customers with low repurchase likelihood:

Impulsive and make one-time purchases, usually without a clear reason for buying.

How do you use customer personas?

Customer personas allow for personalized marketing tailored to specific customers or targeted at specific groups of customers.

Instead of sending the same email to all potential customers, you can categorize them individually and adjust messaging based on their unique preferences.

Moreover, combining customer personas with the customer's purchase lifecycle stages can help create a "Customer Lifecycle - Persona Map" to develop highly targeted content appropriate for each stage.

Lastly, creating Negative Personas helps identify and eliminate 'bad apples' among all customers. This can reduce lead costs per acquisition and customer acquisition costs, while also enhancing sales productivity by removing customers who should not be catered to.

How do you create customer personas?

Customer personas are developed through research, surveys, and interviews with target customers.

This includes existing customers, potential customers, and those who align with the ideal (target) customer profile but for whom data is not available.

Here are a few methods to collect information needed for persona development:

1) Interview customers face-to-face or over the phone:

Discover what they like about your products or services.

2) Analyze existing customer data:

Identify patterns in how specific potential customers or customers find and consume your content.

3) Use form fields on your website to identify persona information:

For example, include a field for company size if segmenting personas by company size. If social media accounts are important, collect information on the types of social media leads use.

4) Categorize feedback from potential customers contacted frequently by the sales team:

Generalize and categorize the characteristics of satisfied customers who are well-served and frequently contacted by the sales team.

If you find the above methods challenging, consider Perfomars's Persona Marketing Agency.

Perfomars will help you identify ideal customers, directly interview your company's customers and potential customers, and establish and implement a systematic marketing strategy based on deep insights.

Create your own customer persona.

Now it's time to create your persona.

Collect and analyze relevant information through simple research and use the template below to create your company's persona data.

If you use HubSpot, you can enter the data created above into the persona data fields and create and manage personas directly.

If you are looking to continuously enhance your personalized approach through the development of personas, we recommend signing up for the Find My Market persona automatic creation solution.