The 5 best guides for creating a customer persona

How well do you know your customers? If you’re like most of us, probably not as well as you should. One of the biggest mistakes marketers, product teams, and designers make is not developing a deep enough understanding of their customer’s needs and so making a lot of assumptions about how to solve for them. That’s why creating customer personas is so important.

What is a customer persona?

A customer persona (also known as a buyer persona) is a semi-fictional archetype that represents the key traits of a large segment of your audience, based on the data you’ve collected from user research and web analytics. It gives you insight into what your prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh potential options that address the problem they want to solve. Adele Revella, founder of Buyer Persona Institute, describes it like this:

Actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions—the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.

Why are customer personas important?

Customer personas can provide tremendous value and insight to your organization. For example, they can help everyone on your team:

• Develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and how to solve for them
• Guide product development by creating features that help them achieve their desired outcomes
• Prioritize which projects, campaigns, and initiatives to invest time and resources in
• Create alignment across the organization and rally other teams around a customer-centric vision

And as a result, you’ll be better equipped to serve your customers and deliver a superior experience that keeps them coming back for more. But if you don’t nail down your customer personas, every aspect of your product development process, user experience, and marketing campaigns, will suffer. A lot has been written about how to create a customer persona. But wading through all the noise to find the best resources takes a long time. Here are the five best resources to help you create effective customer personas.

1. The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Personas

If you’ve never created a customer persona before, or if you need a quick refresher, we recommend starting with this guide from Buffer. You’ll get a high-level understanding of what customer personas are, why they’re important, and how to create them. While it doesn’t go into as much depth as some of the other resources below, it’s a great place to start learning.

Via Buffer

2. How To Create Customer Personas With Actual, Real Life Data

This guide from ConversionXL makes the case that, to be effective, personas need to be based on data-driven research, rather than opinions and assumptions. This section from the book sums it up well:

Patching together actionable information about your customers with gut feelings, good intentions and some duct tape is not a recipe for conversion success… The problem with many personas is that they are either based on irrelevant data, poorly sourced data, or no data at all.

You’ll learn three ways to collect qualitative user feedback, and how to combine those insights with your web analytics data to get the complete picture of your customer’s behavior. You’ll learn that you need to use multiple sources of data to understand the motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and desired outcomes of your customers.

Via Mailchimp

3. How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business

This resource from HubSpot gives you a step-by-step guide on how to conduct in-person customer interviews for your persona research. It goes into specific detail on how to set up your interviews, tips for recruiting interviewees, and exact questions you can ask during your interviews.

Via Hubspot

4. Personas: The Art and Science of Understanding the Person Behind the Visit

Although the introduction of this guide from Moz initially makes it sound like it’s only for marketers, it’s equally applicable to any UX designer or product team that wants to create a persona. This guide gets really specific about how to collect:

• Qualitative feedback - using customer interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic research
• Quantitative research - using your web analytics, market segmentation tools, multiple choice surveys, and other internal data

It also explains the difference between segments, cohorts, and personas, and gives specific use cases for how you can implement personas into your organization.

Via Moz

5. Quick and Dirty Guide to Creating Actionable Content Marketing Personas

This guide from the Content Marketing Institute shares essential steps to create and apply content marketing personas that get results you can put into action. Although it was originally written for content marketers, the underlying principles apply to designers, product managers, and other marketers too.

Via Content Marketing Institute

Bonus resources

If you’d like to learn more about how to create customer personas, see customer persona examples, and how to use them to enhance your entire customer journey, check out these resources:

Customer persona templates

• 20 Questions to Ask When Creating Buyer Personas [Free Template]
• The Persona Templates Used by Over 130,000 Businesses
• 15 must-see user persona templates

Other bonus resources

• 14 Ways to Get More Use Out of Your Buyer Personas
• 8 Rookie Mistakes You Might Be Making With Buyer Personas
• The Awesome Buyer Persona Word Doc Generator
• How Moz Builds Buyer Personas
• A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 1)
• A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 2)
• Target Audience Personas: The Benefits of Persona Development

Leveraging personas to create better experiences

Whether you’re a product manager, UX designer, or marketer, customer personas can help you develop a deeper understanding of:

• Your customer’s needs
• How to solve for them
• Which features, campaigns, and initiatives to prioritize

Just remember that your personas are only as good as the data-driven research that goes into them. They should be based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collected from multiple sources—not from the opinions and assumptions of your team.

Want to learn more?

If you’d like to learn how UserTesting can help you understand your customers through on-demand human insight, contact us here.