How to Easily Create Customer Personas
I’m sure you’ve heard the term customer persona several times and some of you may think it is a complex marketing term. Fear not - customer personas are an easy yet enormously useful tool that can help you deeply understand your customer’s needs and wants.
A customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a somewhat fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data and insights gathered from market research, user feedback, and analytics.
These personas capture the key traits, behaviors, motivations, and challenges of a specific segment of your audience.
While primary research is often the gold standard in creating personas, secondary data is a cost-effective alternative without the time and expense that can come with primary research.
Secondary data refers to information that has already been collected by other sources, including industry reports, government statistics, academic studies and social media analytics.
There are several reasons why I like to use secondary data when building customer personas:
Cost-Effective: It saves both time and money compared to conducting primary research. Primary methods of surveys, focus groups and 1:1 interviews can be extremely cost-prohibitive for many small- and medium-sized businesses.
Rich Insights: Secondary data can offer valuable information about demographics, behaviors, and preferences that shape marketing strategies.
Broad Scope: Secondary data gives access to a wide range of topics and populations that may be difficult to access directly. Marketing and government databases can offer a wealth of data without the need for primary research.
Below are the steps I like to use to create customer personas with secondary research:
1. Identify Relevant Sources
Start by identifying the best sources of secondary data for your industry, including market reports and government data. Government publications can provide detailed demographic information and social media platforms can provide insights into consumer behaviors and interests.
2. Analyze the Data
Once you have gathered your data, analyze it to find patterns and trends. For example, look for age ranges and lifestyle characteristics that dominate your target market. What generation does your target customer fall in? How many children do they typically have? What social media channels do they use the most?
3. Craft Your Personas
Now that you have your data and trends ready, it is time to create your customer personas. Focus on characteristics that are most relevant to your business, including age, gender, location, and income level. Be sure to also include psychographics like interests, values, motivations, and pain points.
To make your personas more relatable, give each one a name and backstory. For example, "Tech-Savvy Tom" could be a 30-year-old male who values innovation and sustainability in products. This helps bring your personas to life and makes them more useful for product development and marketing.
Keep in mind that the goal is not to create a perfect representation of every customer but to have a useful tool that can help you better define and understand your target market.
Creating customer personas using secondary data is both an art and a science. By following these steps, you can develop research-based customer personas that can help guide your strategies.
Need more help with your customer persona creation? Contact me here.
- Kristen
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