Building personas for your customers

Done well, personas can dramatically enhance your marketing and customer experience

Empathy isn’t just useful in personal relationships. Businesses that can empathise with their customers, anticipate their needs, and deliver products and services that resonate will gain an edge in whatever markets they’re competing. And building accurate customer ‘personas’ – detailed, semi-fictional profiles that encapsulate the characteristics, behaviours, and motivations of your ideal customers and clients – will help you unlock their motivations, habits, and needs. You may remember covering target customer personas in Module 5 – Developing a Marketing Strategy.

Start with conversations, not just data

‘Talk to people!’ urges Anjali Ramachandran, Director of content marketing agency Storythings. ‘If you can meet them in person, great – but even online Zoom calls will do the job.’ For Ramachandran, these user interviews should be structured. She recommends developing a questionnaire beforehand and probing users with examples about how they use your product or service… or why they don’t.

The oft-cited Nielsen Norman Group guidelines suggest that just five well-conducted, one-hour interviews can yield robust insights. ‘You don’t need hundreds or thousands to build personas,’ Ramachandran explains. Supplement these conversations, she says, with accessible data from platforms like Ipsos, YouGov, or even ChatGPT. ‘But always, always speak to real people to validate. There’s no substitute for a proper conversation.’

Leverage what you already know

Mine your internal knowledge, advises Paul Baines, Professor of Political Marketing at the University of Leicester. ‘Brainstorm customer types in a meeting with a group of employees from sales, marketing and other customer-facing functions,’ he says. Follow this with a ‘Pareto analysis’ to determine what percentage of customers account for the majority of your turnover. ‘It often corresponds to the typical 80/20 rule,’ he reckons.

Examine your sales records too. Identify patterns in customer sectors, regions or budgets. For start-ups which lack this kind of historical data, Baines recommends immersing yourself in the target industry. ‘See if you can access any industry reports through your library, professional association, or local university,’ he suggests.

Build around behaviours, not demographics

When it comes to constructing the personas themselves, Baines and Ramachandran agree: demographics alone won’t cut it. Ramachandran warns against rigid demographic boxes, giving an example from her own agency: ‘The customer for a health food brand may be a young mother as well as a health-conscious older man – but they exhibit the same behaviour from a needs perspective.’

Her agency, Storythings, focuses on media habits and behaviours rather than simplistic demographic distinctions. ‘More and more, personas are contested as an accurate reflection of a large swathe of the audience,’ she explains. Behaviour-based insights, even if derived from a small sample, can better inform campaigns that chime with real needs.

Baines says each persona should be rich in practical detail: ‘Include a brief background, job title, goals and challenges, how they use your product or service and their media and digital media preferences.’

Guard against bias and stereotyping

Even with good intentions, bias can creep in. Baines outlines five common pitfalls:

• Stereotyping: assuming people in the same demographic group have the same needs.
• Confirmation bias: seeking only the data that confirms your existing beliefs.
• Availability bias: relying on the most accessible data rather than the most relevant.
• Affinity bias: creating personas that mirror yourself or your team.
• Oversimplification: developing personas that are too generic to be useful.

To combat these, Baines emphasises the need for continuous updating and internal checks. ‘Sense-check your personas with other people in the firm or the customers themselves,’ he says. Ramachandran agrees: ‘Don’t assume everybody can be bucketed in the same way because they are of a certain age or demographic.’ Instead, she urges businesses to ‘take the time to speak to people and focus on needs,’ noting that stereotyping can alienate potential customers who don’t feel seen or heard.

Make personas work for you

Done well, personas can dramatically enhance your marketing and customer experience. Baines cites Thomson Reuters as a good case study. The news and technology company created buyer personas for its compliance software including Indirect Tax Analyst, Senior Tax Preparer, and Manager of State and Local Tax. This helped the team responsible for marketing the software tailor messaging across email, display search, web, video, and mobile platforms. But he says the outcome – tailored communication, better lead conversion, improved revenue – can be just the same for small businesses. And it’s a process that doesn’t require deep pockets, just curiosity, listening, and a willingness to challenge your assumptions.

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