What Is A Persona and Why Is It Important?

Your business is open and you’re ready for customers, but who are your customers? Answering this question is one of the most important to understand as you build your business plan and map out your marketing strategy.

How do you get started? It all begins with developing a persona.

What is a persona?

A persona is a fictional character that represents an ideal business customer. 

Having a persona helps to paint a picture of who your ideal customer is. Persona development looks at your ideal customer demographics, psychographics, motivations, goals, behaviors and preferences so that you have a full understanding of how your business can meet them where they are with relevant messaging, placements and services/products.

When developing a persona, you may ask questions like:

• How old are they?
• What gender do they identify with?
• What level of education do they have?
• Do they have a family?
• Are they rural or in the city?
• What types of products or services are they interested in or already purchasing?
• What are their motivations for purchasing your product or service? 
• What is the best time or place to reach them?
• What is their communication preference? Do they use social media, email, etc.?
• What other life circumstances do they have going on that would impact their purchasing decision now and in the future? 

As you start to think about your ideal customer, you may notice that you have more than one target audience and that’s great! However, you’ll need to create multiple personas. You may be asking, why would I need to consider creating multiple personas? 

It may come as a surprise, but people aren’t one size fits all. 🙂

Your business may sell the same product to several types of customers, but their motivations for purchasing, life cycle stage, demographics, etc. could be very different [or similar in some instances].

For example, imagine you are an insurance brokerage selling insurance products to businesses and individuals. The products and services that you offer to a customer will vary. The portfolio of products and services you recommend to an established business owner looking to offer comprehensive health and life insurance to a growing roster of employees as a retention tool could be very different from a 26 year old healthy individual looking for basic and low-cost health insurance coverage. Both customers’ motivations, needs and preferences are vastly different, but they can both be your target customers for your business, just different personas.

Why is a persona important?

When you drill into the products and services that you sell, you’ll often see clearly that there are different types of people that you sell to [or want to]. 

Developing a persona allows you to take a step outside of innate preferences and humanize your customer for you, your stakeholders and employees to better understand. It can be challenging in the day-to-day to remember who your business serves. You may think your business is open for everyone, but at the heart of a successful business and marketing strategy is the knowledge of who your key customers are and how to effectively and efficiently reach them.

Having well articulated personas gives you a check and balance for decisions you will make for all business decisions moving forward. Once you have the knowledge of who your key customers are, you are able to clearly communicate and reach them effectively to achieve your business goals and drive revenue.

You’ve convinced me, now what?

With the understanding of what a persona is and why it is important, it’s time to begin creating a persona [or a few] for your business. Get started by asking the questions mentioned above and by looking into relevant business information to uncover who your customers are.

Look for trends by:

1. Mining existing sales data
2. Reviewing website usage + social engagement
3. Diving into a competitive analysis and market trends

Once you start to see who your ideal customer[s] are, it’s time to continue to dig deeper, ask ‘why’ and craft your persona[s] for your business. Do you need a guide to come alongside your persona development or do you want someone to put personas together for you? Learn more about Bondi’s brand planning services here or fill out our contact form and we’ll get started.