Crafting your Customer Personas - Step-by-step

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00:01 All right, welcome. We're going to take a look today at crafting your customer persona or your ICP, ideal customer profile, a customer avatar.

00:09 They all mean the same thing. What we want to do here is gain an understanding as to who your ideal customer is.

00:16 We want to know everything that we can about them. So in building a customer persona, we want to start by looking at the personal background.

00:23 We want to find out about their age, gender, marital status, geographic location, their education, their career information, any other demographic or biographic information that's going to allow us to better emphasize with your target audience.

00:36 So here we want to be clear that we want to be specific enough that we realize who this person is, but we don't want to be so detailed that it really limits who they are.

00:45 So we may want to say something like a 32-year-old woman who is married, lives in the Midwest, has a law degree, and is a lawyer practicing at a university.01:01 So that does it, maybe, you can add in their salary or their household income, potentially, can also be very helpful.

01:10 What we don't want to see is getting so specific that it's a 32-year-old woman who is single, ah twice divorced

.01:21 And lives in the Highland Park area of Chicago, um was um uh you know went to Northwestern University, dropped out, then attended community college, like all that is just way too specific and it really limits who the persona applies to.01:36 So we want to again just be specific enough that we can visualize who this person is. Next let's go give it a name.

01:41 Okay, I'm going to go actually to slideshow form here guys so you can see it a little bit bigger. So the name, adding the name actually actually helps to humanize the persona. It paints a picture of who this person is, right?

01:52 So it also creates a shared language that can be become something that can be used in your organization. So when you're referring to your ICP, you can say, you know, it's it's Steven or it's it's Michael or it's Andre.

02:06 And everyone knows who you're talking about. You're talking about the ideal customer profile. So we want to also make sure we don't use a name here of someone that you know very well that you attach a personality to because that could start to infiltrate in how you visualize this person, okay?02:21 So just be try to use the name that that, you know, no one's ever heard before, right? And then a photo.

02:28 Thank you. A photo would be anything you can grab off the internet. You're not putting this into the, you know, into the public world.

02:35 So feel free to find someone that just kind of matches who your customer profile is. Like, make sure that it embodies the descriptive information of your persona, even your If you're attaching an ethnicity to your ICP, um, obviously that's going to really help to again, visualize this person.

02:54 We had a client do one that was like, it was a busy mom and it was like a pic, the picture was her, you know, holding her, her, her phone like this against her ear, like doing three things at once, trying to feed her, you know, feed her child in a high chair.

03:06 Um, that, you know, really embodied who they were trying Um, so it doesn't necessarily just have to be a face, it could actually be kind of an action shot as well.

03:14 You can find this in stock photography, you can find it online, really easy to find this Um, a little bit harder to find finances, so, you know, we want to look at income, spending habits, preferred method of payment, and you can get this stuff from looking at sales records or customer surveys.

03:30 But I really like to just focus on generational buying power. For me, and for what we've seen with customer personas here, that gets specific enough.

03:38 Um, because, you know, like if you're talking about a Gen Xer or a Boomer, they have a very different buying power than a Millennial or certainly a Gen Zer, right.

03:49 So, that generational buying power can really help. I mean, you can even like do a Google search for generational buying power and generational spending habits and it's going to show you a whole bunch of studies and surveys that have been conducted probably in the last six months.

04:03 So, it's going to be really current and this is free research. So, use it. Use anything that's free. Google's great.

04:08 It's your friend. Use it and that can really help you with this part. A day in the life. This is where you know we really want to break down how your customer persona spends his or her day starting from the beginning and showing how their daily life impacts how they consume.

04:28 I like to ensure when building customer persona when I do my day in the life, I want to make sure to include how it involves using your product or service.

04:39 So if you're selling like a dog harness for example, when you go through the day in the life, wakes up in the morning, has breakfast, walks his dog before he goes to work, spends his day at the office, goes to the gym, comes home, has dinner, walks his dog again after dinner.

04:57 You know, those are important because we see how you're interacting with that dog harness that you're selling. So you don't want to capture every single moment of their waking life either.

05:06 That's way too specific. Just like that first step I do. You know, defining the biographic information. You don't want to get too specific.

05:16 You don't want to get too specific here either. Just sort of a snapshot of their day. And again, how does that involve using your product or service?

05:23 Hopes and dreams. What do they want? What do they need both personally and professionally? This is going to really help you create some really good targets for targeted content.

05:31 It can help you actually develop new products as well because it's going to identify gaps in your current offering if they're not meeting the hopes and dreams of your ICP.

05:40 Where do you find this? Sales teams are great. Your customer service teams can be great for this as well. Social media can really provide great insights.

05:48 And feeling all that. I mean, you could just sort of take a stab at it, right? Like how, how do you think your ICP would spend their day?

05:55 Um, and you, you may just want to also like look at it from the opposite perspective, which we're going to get into in a second, which is fears and worries, because a little bit of rephrasing can turn a fear into a dream.

06:10 But vice versa. So fears and worries would be understanding what the internal, external fears are with your customer persona so you can better empathize with them, right?

06:18 So again, this will help you craft messages that speaks to your target audience and alleviates fear, but also can sometimes even prey on that fear and evoke an emotional connection.

06:27 Remember, marketers, they do. They do. You know, good marketing absolutely preys on emotion, okay? So uhm, you can look at anything that could deal with their top frustrations, their pain points, right?

06:41 And what do we say in sales? You find out what are the, what's the pain point and how are you going to cure that pain point.

06:46 So fears and worries are also a very important part of defining your ideal customer profile. Technology, what is their comfort level with technology?

06:55 How do they use technology? Uhm, you know, we can gather this by basic analytics. If you look at Google Analytics, it will break down the technology that your customers are using.

07:06 That's usually, you know, a go-to for me. Uhm, but the comfort level umm that they have with that technology, uhh I go back to generational there, right?

07:18 Like if you're talking about a boomer, a baby boomer, they're gonna have a lot less comfort with technology than a gen Z or for sure, right?

07:28 At the same time, uhh. You may look at like in terms of social networks, umm for example a, you know, if you're talking about a boomer, a gen xer, you may be looking more at Facebook, Instagram, if you're looking at a gen Z or you're talking maybe more uh TikTok or Snapchat.

07:45 And uhh, maybe you're from now I'll have to redo this video because some other social networks are gonna go. Come along and TikTok's gonna become uhh you know uhh the my parents social social networks.

07:57 So uhh the happens fast as we know in this industry but for now you really want to get a sense of it.

08:02 I think generational can give you that comfort level. And again your actual analytics Google analytics will tell you the exact technology that's been used as well as screen res and and everything else like that.

8:09 Social media profiles. So what channels? We're just talking about this but it really helps to, helps you uuhm decide where to invest your marketing spend if you know what social media channels they use.

08:24 So again this can go with, I'm being repetitive here but this goes back to the generational buying power. You. Kinda, or generational, sorry, your generational study to see what are they using, right?

08:37 What social networks are they using but also what is their level of engagement, right? Like if they don't really typically engage, it's good to know that.

08:45 And you can look at that through depending on how deep your social media history is, you can look at your own engagement levels and.

08:50 You say, yeah, we got a lot of lurkers here, right? But not so much active posters or vice versa. And that can really cater just how much you, uh, cater your decision as to how much you want to put into organic social.

09:05 If they just don't seem to engage very well, then you're not going to really delve that deeply into that. You'll, you'll potentially steward your efforts elsewhere.09:14 What influences your persona? Where does your persona get its information from? Um, where are they going if they have a question?

09:21 Uh, publications, websites, social groups, other media channels. What influences them, right? So when looking at what influences your persona, you want to consider the entire customer.0

9:30 So we're not just talking about what influences them to actually make the purchasing decision, but what influences them in driving awareness, driving consideration, driving conversion, driving retention, to get them to come back, and what influences them to.

09:50 To advocate your product, in other words, tell friends and family about your product, right? So look at it from each stage of that customer journey, and there may be different influences at each stage.

10:02 Brand affinities really help too to identify who your customer persona is, the way they spend um you know what kind of brands they associate themselves with is really good to know.10:14 So are they Best Western or Ritz Carlton? Um right? Are they uh Hertz or Avis? That's a little more fine, right?

10:22 Um I don't know what you really get out of that, but um but you you can look at what are they loyal to?

10:30 Um Um and it gives you a sense of their priorities. So um if they are let's say you know shopping for their clothes at Walmart, but they're shopping for their food at Whole Foods, what does that tell you, right?10:46 They're putting a lot more value on potentially the- the- the- the- the- the foods they purchase for their- for their household are made and manufactured versus how their clothing is manufactured, right?

11:01 Um so it- just really important to- to nail down what brands they're- they associate with them. Do they drive a Hyundai?

11:10 Nice. The car. Nothing wrong with it. Just tells you something that someone who drives an Hyundai is probably a very different person than someone who drives a Tesla, um, or a Lexus, uh, or a Jaguar, right?

11:22 So these are just- these brand affinities can really help you define, um, who your target audience is. And you know what?

11:29 It could even form strategic partnerships and co- branding opportunities. So that's it. Uh, after that's just one more step and that's a quote, a quote that sort of exemplifies all the who this person is.11:40 And I want this quote to be associated with how they use your products. Okay, so it would be, um, something along the lines of.

11:52 Uh, let me give you an example. Um, if you're selling that's a nutritional supplements, um, I want what is best for my kids, but sometimes it's really hard to know what that is.

12:04 Okay, so that's the kind of thing we'd be looking for there. Alright, so yeah that's the that's that's basically it.

12:13 Um, for, uh, for this and I hope it was found out you found it helpful. Um, build that customer persona, really nail down who that person is and we'll see you on the other side.