Customer personas help businesses focus on the needs of its customers. Business owners demonstrate this focus by creating products and services that address their customers’ needs and pain points. Even though this is a key tool to effectively serving your client base, creating customer personas is not as common as many would think.

It’s time for you to consider what your customer/buyer personas look like, and why they are important to your business. 

What is a customer persona?

Buyer personas are used to help business owners understand their target audience and can be a highly effective way of offering a better approach to understand a specific group. Personas can be described as fictional characters, based on data and shared customer or client understandings. Your customer personas represent the specific audiences that it is most important for you to connect with.   

How to create a customer persona.

To create your customer personas, you’ll need to really dig into who they are. One of the first places to start is outlining their demographics: gender, age, income and location. You’ll need to understand their background, which can include their education level, job, career path, family, and socio-economic status. Also, you’ll need to know a little about their typical personality traits. For example, what is their demeanor, communication preferences, etc. What are their goals? What challenges are they facing? Content Marketing Institute outlines 9 specific parts that create a customer persona: day in the life, objectives, problems, orientation, obstacles, questions, preferences, keywords and phrases, engagement scenarios. All of this info provides you with insight to what drives them and how to communicate with them.

To further develop these personas, in addition to gathering the data, you can conduct customer interviews, use your website analytics, send surveys, etc.

Creating a great persona.

Some of the best personas created result in the following:

  • Allow you to answer/provide the solution to their problems.
  • Provide clarity on where they spend their time.
  • Help you produce content that makes them feel seen and valued.
  • Answers the question: What do they care about?
  • Allow your marketing team to produce content that speaks directly to your target audience.

Do’s and Don’ts

  • Personas:
    • Are built on data
    • Represent actual attitudes, thinking and goals
    • Are not built on assumptions
    • Should be used as a design tool that allow for deep customer empathy
    • Are not a single individual
    • A way of ensuring that you keep your customers at the center of your marketing efforts
    • Are not based on assumptions

Check out this article, 8 Rookie Mistakes You Might Be Making With Buyer Personas to learn more about persona do’s and don’ts.

What to do with the insight?

Not making use of the information you have gathered about your audience is not a very effective way to spend your time as a business owner. Below are some ways to make that knowledge work for you.

  • Concentrate your efforts on where your customers hang out. If the majority of your customers use LinkedIn, that’s where you should be too. You don’t want to waste ad spend on places your people are not hanging out at.
  • Speak their language. If they love emojis; use emojis. If they speak company jargon, speak it too.
  • Craft persona-specific content. Create content your customers care about.
  • Partner with people your personas love. Work with influencers.


Developing customer personas help team members, solopreneurs, small business owners, and entrepreneurs better understand their customers. They also provide a means to help solve their customers’ problems. When you consider what your audience is searching for, it helps your business maintain its focus on your customers. I’d love to dig in and help you create your customer personas. Schedule a call with me, to see how I can help


  • This is very helpful. I am new to the world of content marketing, and I had never heard of the idea of a “customer persona.” This helped clarify a lot of things for me that my marketing guy has been saying. Thank you so much.

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