Create target customer personas to develop successful growth strategies

To create successful growth strategies, relevant marketing campaigns and products that deliver real value to your customers, you must first understand your customers. Doing that requires studying them, talking to them and building target personas to help you make them real to your team. Developing your customer profile is an integral piece of positioning your brand and an indispensable section of your brand book.

Many founders broaden their total addressable market (TAM) to make the numbers on fundraising decks seem more exciting, but effective customer targeting requires you to surgically narrow to a specific customer profile — right down to a name, an age and even a face. Once you’ve identified your customer, it’s critically important to articulate the demographic and ethnographic elements that define them. Demographic information (such as location, gender, marital status) isn’t nearly enough, and to understand the customer, you must also understand relevant ethnographic elements like their lifestyles and motivations.

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Here’s how:

Pull a list of your most dedicated users for each metric that matters to your company, such as highest LTV, most frequent user, highest number of purchases or even highest referring customer. Your goal is to generate a list of customers, and the exact number may vary depending on the stage of your company. For a seed company, I’d recommend pulling a list of 15-25 customers. If you’re pre-launch and don’t have customers just yet, you can build a list of your desired users using external data from third-party apps and Google.

Create a spreadsheet that includes at a minimum the following parameters:

• Unique customer ID
• Location
• Gender
• Age
• Career/profession
• Referral source
• Marital status
• Education
• Purchasing behavior (defining first purchase, second purchase, third purchase, etc.) and/or engagement behavior (first, interaction, second interaction and so on.)
• LTV

Since the above parameters include both internal and external data, you’ll have to use third-party tools or even do some cyber-sleuthing (you’ll be surprised how much you can learn with a Google search). Leverage your own database for usage behavior and customer journey, but put in the elbow grease necessary to understand more about each customer.

Schedule interviews with 10 to 15 of your top customers — this is typically a sizable enough sample to reveal trends and common themes. Offering honorariums such as a $50 credit or gift certificate in exchange for people’s time can incentivize them. Interviews can be done via a 30-minute Zoom call (I highly recommend having the video function on so you can see the person). This is primary market research, so avoid the temptation to use these sessions for user testing a new feature or to get product feedback!

The purpose of these conversations is to explore the utility of the product or service in the lives of your most active users and to uncover the product’s key value in their lives. To get at these topics in a 30-minute Zoom call, you’ll need to ask sharp, focused questions, such as:

• Tell me about your experience(s) using the brand.
• How did you first hear/learn about the brand?
• What made you try it for the first time?
• What was going on in your life when you first used the brand?
• What was your first experience like?
• How did you feel going in?
• How did you feel after trying it?
• How did it make your life easier?
• Who do you see as the core users of this product?
• How would you describe this product to a friend?

Beginning the session with some small talk — e.g., tell me a little bit about yourself, name, age, job, where you live, etc. — will help establish rapport and help produce more demographic details.

Using your interviews and spreadsheet as inputs, analyze what you’ve learned. Look for trends about customer profiles, motivations, lifestyles, preferences and behaviors. Your analysis may reveal you have one really important profile of customer, or several different types of customers.

For each type of customer you identify (try to keep it to three or less), you’ll now develop a persona to represent your “typical” or ideal customer. The persona should include enough detail to bring this person to life, taking you inside their mind and motivations to offer insights into why they do what they do (and why they buy what they buy). Name each persona and select a photograph so that your whole team can really “get to know” this customer.

Below is an example of a persona from an events ticketing company:

Meet Stephanie.

Bio: Stephanie is 30 years old and lives alone just outside of San Francisco.

Motivation: She is a live event aficionado and loves attending sporting events and concerts.

Lifestyle: She works as a bartender most nights so avoids bars and restaurants as part of her normal social activity. If she isn’t at a concert or at games, she’s at home.

Preferences: She would rather spend $100 on attending a live event than on a nice dinner.

Social: Since she is usually “in the know” about upcoming games and concerts, she tends to be the ringleader of her social group and typically influences two to five friends to purchase tickets to events she attends.

Relevant behaviors: She usually buys her tickets last minute because she knows prices will drop. For the last major concert she planned to attend, she bought her ticket on BART (public transit) on the way to the stadium.

Putting your personas into action

Whether you arrived at one, two or three customer personas, your first move is to add them to your brand book to signal their importance and inform your entire team about who the target customers are. Introduce every member of every team to these customers, by name. It’s important for those developing the product, driving the social media channels, developing the marketing campaigns or fielding customer support tickets to truly internalize these personas and keep them top of mind as they work to grow your company. The personas provide a relatable and tangible face for your whole customer (and future customer) base.

In addition to getting everyone on the same page about who you’re building for, the personas provide a critically important reference for optimizing acquisition campaigns. They inform strategies by telling you who to target, how to segment and where to focus your efforts. They also reveal what should be said.

By clearly articulating the preferences, pain points and motivations of your ideal customers, you’ll be able to approach messaging in an informed and strategic manner. Personas should be one of the key inputs your marketing team uses to establish value propositions and real copy that will resonate with your ideal customer base. Simply put, all marketing messaging is a conversation with these specific people.

Finally, these personas serve as a vital input to your product team. They’re a focus group you can carry in your mind. When determining the product roadmap, they help make clear what to build and when. They also speak to how to optimize for conversion, engagement and loyalty.

While some fast-paced startups may look at developing target customer personas as a mere academic exercise, the teams that take the time to build these integral tools are at an advantage, armed with something that gives them clarity, direction and a true edge.