How to Create a Customer Profile or Buyer Persona (With Our Free Template)
One of the most effective ways of targeting your audience with your content marketing efforts is to create a customer profile or buyer persona. Below, I’ve put together a template to help you better identify who your audience is. Customer profiling can help you refine your marketing efforts and encourage your customers to take action when they visit your website. Here’s the customer profile template I use to help me understand my copywriting clients’ customers better:
- What is your customer’s job title?
- How long have they been in their role?
- Who do they work with?
- What tasks do they carry out on a daily basis?
- What are their responsibilities?
- What are their business needs?
- What do they like and dislike about their jobs?
- What role do they play in buying from you?
- What objections might they have to buying from you?
Depending on how deeply you want to look at your customer profiles, you can give your customers names, add photographs and maybe even physical descriptions if your business sells clothes or specialist equipment. The more detail you give your buyer personas, the easier it’ll be for you to think of them as real people and consider their needs more effectively.
Segmenting Your Customers
Just as no two people are the same, neither are your customers. Segmenting your customers into particular groups can be an effective way to identify their different needs. Google analytics is a particularly useful tool to help you gain insights into your customer statistics. You might want to use the information you gather from your analytics to include the following information in your customer profile:
Demographics
- What age is your customer?
- What is their average income?
- What is their marital status?
Geographics
- In which country does your customer live?
- More specifically, which city?
Buying Habits
- Which of your products or services are they most likely to buy?
- Which brands are they likely to associate with?
- Which payment systems are the likely to trust? E.g. Amazon, PayPal.
How Many Customer Profiles Do I Need?
The number of personas you need depends on how many different types of customer you identify. If you primarily sell to a specific age group or gender, you may not need as many personas as you would if your target audience was larger. Similarly, if you sell exclusively to businesses, there’s likely to be a chain of command in the buying process. The person who initially visits your website (the initiator) may not be the one who holds the credit card. Think about how you can convince them to pass on positive information about your products or services to their boss (the decision maker and the one who delegates buying).
Different personas are needed for each customer-type. The chances are that if you were to meet your customers in person, you’d engage with each of them slightly differently. Remember, each customer has different needs, they want different things at different times and they all have different buying habits.
Do you use customer profiling in your marketing efforts? How has it worked for you? Do you use any of the pointers above? I’d be keen to know how you approach customer profiling.