How to create personas that deepen your understanding of your customers

Updated

Updated September 24, 2019

Businesses know more about their customers today than ever. Yet customers remain somewhat of an abstraction, hidden behind reams of data about their occupations, incomes, buying habits and much more. Data tells you about your customer, but what’s it like to be your customer?

For insight, you create a persona, whom you call Sally. Hey Sally! She’s an imaginary but life-like character who represents a segment of your customers. You create other personas, with different characteristics, to represent other customers. Hi Dan, Peggy, Sam and Mollie!

Personas are a synthesis of what you know, what you learn through research and customer interviews and what you reasonably assume (no wild guesses, please) about your customers. You create personas as a first step in mapping your customer journeys. The better you are at creating them, the better you’ll understand your customers, and the better you can serve them. A professional writer can help.

Why a writer?

Personas aren’t new. Businesses have been creating them for some time, drawing on an abundance of tools, templates, software, advice and resources.

What’s different now is that customers have raised the bar.

Customers expect you to outperform your competitors in finding solutions to their business problems, and if you can’t meet their high expectations they’ll take their business elsewhere.

This is where a professional writer comes in.

A writer can help you create well-researched, well-written personas.

Some writers are experienced in writing personas, both from working for clients and from marketing their own services.

Many have skills such as fiction writing, interviewing or data research that are especially suited for creating personas.

You can find these writers through your networks, online job sites and other sources.

Why create a persona?

The time to hire a writer is before you begin creating a persona, not after you’re underway.

You can start by discussing with the writer you hire why you want to craft a persona.

Among the reasons are:

• To better understand the hopes, needs and aspirations of your customers.
• To help your customers find the best solutions to their problems.
• To create and market content that’s exactly tailored to the needs of your customers.
• To build relationships with prospective customers.
• To develop marketing campaigns.
• To test your ideas for new products or services.

How do you create a persona?

You can collaborate with your writer in doing research, conducting interviews with customers and others and writing the persona.

1. What you know.

Start with what you know about your customers.

There are various sources of information about your customers, both inside and outside your company.

Examples are:

• demographic information from your marketing and sales teams and others in your company,
• an analysis of visitors to your web site and social media pages,
• public information about your customers that can be found online,
• customer studies you’ve done (for example, in exploring ideas for new products or services).

2. What you learn.

Interviews

You can learn more by interviewing selected customers (based on whatever selection process you and others in your organization develop).

A writer can assist you in planning, arranging and conducting the interviews.

Your goal is to understand your interviewees not just as customers but as people.

A skilled writer can help you draw them out.

What in their work and in their lives inspires, motivates, surprises, angers, pleases or worries them?  What do they value?

Questions

Here are areas you could cover in customer interviews (in person, preferably, otherwise by phone or online).

1. Work

What is your occupation or profession?

What business is your employer in? (Or, are you self-employed?)

What industry is your company in?  Its size?  Revenue?

What’s your position in your organization?

What skills are required in your job?

What are your responsibilities?

How are you evaluated?

What challenges do you face?

2. Career

What are your career goals?

How do you plan to achieve your goals?

3. Network

What associations do you belong to?

What social media do you use?

4. Information

How do you stay informed?

How do you learn on the job?

How else do you learn (school, publications, online, other)?

5. Demographics

Age

Gender

Education

Salary

Family

Household income

6. Personal

What are your dreams, your aspirations?

What inspires you?

What do you enjoy?

What do you value?

What do you worry about?

Other interviews

In addition to customers themselves, you can interview people in your company: your marketing and sales people, customer service people and others. These interviews can yield insights from people who have direct experience with customers.

Surveys

Besides interviews, you can survey selected customers, using the same interview format.

Through a survey, you can expand the scope of your interviews to include more customers, customers with different backgrounds and perspectives (than those you’ve already interviewed) and more.

Prospects

With a writer’s help, you can also write personas of your most important prospects.

As with your current customers, you can with start what you know about them, do research to learn more about them and, if they agree, interview them.

Creating personas of prospects could prove invaluable in helping you convert prospects to customers.

Writing a persona

Once you’ve completed your interviews and research, you can work with people in your company and your writer to synthesize all the information you’ve collected into personas that help you truly understand your customers.

Here’s an example.

Suppose you’re the marketing director of a real estate company that develops, owns, leases and manages office buildings in metropolitan areas across the U.S.

Your tenants are corporations, small businesses, professional services firms and nonprofit organizations.

You, people in your company, and a writer create personas for each of these four tenant groups.

Example of persona

Here’s what one of these personas might include:

Mark (+ last name).

Title: U.S. director of real estate.

Business: international accounting and professional services firm.

Skills required: visioning, planning, financial management, project management, negotiating, people skills.

Challenges:

Providing comfortable, safe and efficient work environments for the firm’s 20,000 U.S. partners, managers and employees.

Adapting work environments to the firm’s constantly changing business needs.

Achieving the most efficient use of space at the lowest possible cost.

Planning for the firm’s continued growth in the U.S.

Age: 45

Education: MBA.

Married, two children, daughter a college freshman, son a high school senior.

Enjoys: time with family, reading histories and biographies, competing in chess tournaments, kayaking.

Particularly values: trustworthiness, dependability, insightfulness.

What keeps him up at night: The difficulty of planning for the firm’s future need for and use of office space.

Persona non grata: “Vendors and consultants who want our business but don’t know the first thing about our company and our industry. I’ve met my share of them.”

Opportunities

From this persona, and other information, you as marketing director of the real estate company see opportunities for your company to provide or expand services to your tenant, the professional services firm.

1. Advise this firm on planning for future space needs.

2. Develop or buy office buildings for the firm’s use.

3. Manage the firm’s space.

Other information

With a writer’s help, you can elaborate on this persona.

For example:

• write a “day in the life” of the firm’s director of real estate,
• expand on the skills required for his job,
• provide more details about the challenges he faces and
• discuss further his expectations and concerns in working with outside vendors.

Update

A persona isn’t a static document.

It needs continual revising and updating to incorporate new information and remain relevant and useful.

Let’s return for a moment to the real estate company in the earlier example.

In updating its persona of the real estate director of the professional services firm, its tenant, the real estate company realizes it may have to change its business model.

That’s because the firm, and many of the real estate company’s other major tenants, aren’t leasing additional office space at the same rate as in the past.

In fact, many tenants want to reduce the amount of space they use.

What’s this mean for the real estate company?

While it will continue to build and own office buildings, its real future could be as an advisor to tenants — not just its tenants but other tenants as well. It could help tenants make more efficient use of space, reduce the costs of leasing space and create attractive work environments for current and prospective employees.

In conclusion

Writing personas is a team effort to which many people in your company contribute.

But adding a writer to your team can make a difference in whether you create personas that have real value for your company.

With a writer’s help, your personas will give you deeper insights into your customers and prospects, a better understanding of their needs and desires and more opportunities to win business.

And now, I’m going return to writing a persona for my business: providing writing and editing services to clients.

My persona is a 25-year-old Silicon Valley millionaire who’s put me on a $100,000 retainer to write a series of spellbinding white papers. He’s thrown in a $30,000 all-expenses-paid vacation….

Wait a minute.

That’s not a persona.

That’s a fantasy.

Dream on, Carberry.

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