{"id":121050,"date":"2018-12-07T15:52:27","date_gmt":"2018-12-07T14:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brand24.com\/blog\/?p=121050"},"modified":"2026-04-13T17:32:59","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T15:32:59","slug":"how-to-create-customer-personas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brand24.com\/blog\/how-to-create-customer-personas\/","title":{"rendered":"How to create customer personas that will improve your marketing and sales communication"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Have you ever wondered why some products or services are a better fit for certain people than they are for others? It\u2019s not as much about those products themselves as it is about the consumers with different needs. The goods we purchase are specifically designed to appeal to certain types of consumers hence the difference in communication and marketing.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You need to know what kind of customers you want to sell your products to and in order to find out, you should create customer personas.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s a customer persona<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A customer persona is a fictitious character that represents a set of characteristics of your ideal customer. Depending on your product offering and the size of your business, you can have one, ten, or maybe even more personas.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can distinguish different approaches to creating personas. Some of them are going to be extremely detailed, while others will be just loosely related to what a potential customer could be like. There will be personas that are going to be very much descriptive and those that are going to list the key elements with bullet points. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personally, I\u2019d say the more detailed a persona is, the better. As long as we\u2019re not going to dive deep into aspects irrelevant to the consumer choices a persona could make, you want to know about it as much as possible. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to create a customer persona<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As PhD and specialist in personas, Lene Nielsen, mentions in her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas<\/a>,<\/strong> we can distinguish four different perspectives on personas:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alan Cooper\u2019s goal-directed perspective; Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin\u2019s role-based perspective; the engaging perspective that I myself use, which emphasizes how the story can engage the reader (S\u00f8nderstrup-Andersen, 2007); and the fiction-based perspective. The first three perspectives agree that the persona descriptions should be founded on data. However, the fourth perspective, the fiction-based perspective, does not include data as the basis for persona description, but creates personas from the designers\u2019 intuition and assumptions; they have names such as ad hoc personas, assumption personas, and extreme characters.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re all about data at Brand24<\/a> <\/strong>and we\u2019re going to focus on the three, less abstract ways of creating a customer persona. As I have mentioned, there are different approaches to it and I am not going to judge which I think is the best. If it\u2019s the first time you\u2019re creating a customer persona for your business, you need to do thorough research about your current customers. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if I am just starting a business and don\u2019t have any existing customers, you might ask?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, that\u2019s going to be a little bit more difficult but not impossible. No matter what niche you\u2019re in, I am 99% sure there are competitors and their customers you could learn from.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go to the social media channels of your competitors and check out the people who engage with their content. Visit profiles of those people and try to obtain as much information about them as possible. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A brilliant idea Shopify suggested in their post<\/a><\/strong> about customer personas is to go on Similar Web<\/strong> and search where does the traffic of your competitors come from and then try to engage people in those sources.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Other than that, you might also use social media monitoring<\/a> to find conversations about your industry or products similar to yours. Have a look at the people taking part in those chats and try to notice similarities between them. Are they generally men or women? Is it a little bit of both? What age do they seem to be? If possible, find out what do they like and dislike. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, let\u2019s assume you already have some traction as a business and have a reasonable number of customers you can build your personas upon. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You probably store your customers\u2019 data in some sort of CRM. We use Intercom <\/strong>at Brand24 and while it\u2019s of great value in terms of live chats with our customers, it\u2019s even more important to us as far as data on their behaviour is concerned. Information such as a number of logins and web sessions let us evaluate how engaged those people are and it\u2019s easier for us to find out how to reach more of such people.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, the aforementioned live chats enable us to ask the customers directly about their needs, concerns and problems they encounter while using the tool. Those pieces of information are the most crucial as we obtain them first-hand. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other than that, you could also conduct a survey among your existing customers, trial users testing your products, as well as other people that for some reason haven\u2019t signed up for your product yet but are potentially your future customers. Use tools like Survicate<\/strong> or Google Forms<\/strong> to get the feedback you could use while building your customer personas.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What information should I include in my customer personas<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now that we know how to get the information required to create customer personas, it\u2019s time to finally put the pieces together. You might look up persona templates online that you\u2019ll just need to fill in with data, but in case you wanted to build a template yourself, here\u2019s what should be on your list:<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n