Have you ever tried to make a complicated meal without a recipe? Not knowing the necessary ingredients or method can result in less-than-ideal results. It gets messy and confusing, and the same can be for brands and businesses when they don’t know exactly who they need to target.

This is where customer personas come into play.

A customer persona represents your brand’s ideal buyer type (you can have multiple), and creating one helps your team or company as a whole better understand who to target with your marketing messaging.

What will you be able to accomplish with thought-out customer personas?

  • You’ll be able to acquire the right audience.
  • Keep existing and new customers engaged with targeted messaging.
  • Improve conversion rates with highly-focused content. (In fact, personalized emails have improved conversion rates by 10%)

A solid customer persona is the perfect recipe for an effective marketing or advertising campaign — and we’re here to help you build one. 

Customer Personas vs. Target Market

Before we get into the how and the why of customer personas, we need to first differentiate them from a brand’s target market. Target market involves factors such as location, age, gender, income, education, etc. While customer personas include all of this information as well, they go a step further.

What seperates two different people who may share some of the same basic demographic factors? This is when we incorporate customer personas. Think about your ideal customer or audience, and ask yourself these questions:

  • Who needs the product or service I’m selling? 
  • What are their interests?
  • What does their day-to-day life look like?
  • What are their pains or challenges?

These are the factors that help you build an effective and accurate customer persona. And now, it’s time to learn how to do just that.

Building Customer Personas: A Step-by-Step Guide

Step One: Define The Basics

Before you dive into creating your complete customer persona, you want to first make sure you understand who your customer actually is, through and through. In order to do this, we must start with the basics. 

As we mentioned above, it’s important to ask yourself all of the basic demographic and behavioral questions about your customer:

  • How old are they?
  • Where do they live?
  • How do they spend their time and money?
  • What is a consistent pain or challenge for them?
  • How and why would your product or service benefit them?

How can you go about finding this information? You can do some extensive market research or even talk to your sales team, or anyone in your company that speaks to or deals with customers directly. They are an excellent resource that shouldn’t go untapped.

Step Two: Use Data To Refine Your Customer Persona

Once you’ve nailed down the basics, you can turn to different platforms to really refine your customer personas. Here, we’ve outlined how to use both Google Analytics and HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” feature to outline every aspect and detail of your specific customer.

Google Analytics

First, let’s talk about Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics for your site gives you a breakdown of visitor demographics. What exactly can this platform tell you?

  • Your audience’s age and gender.
  • Where your audience lives.
  • Lifestyle interests.
  • The browser and device most frequently used.
  • Which social channels they use.
  • Popular keywords.

This gives you a very basic rundown of your typical visitor. Use this information as the template for the most specific persona you can create with HubSpot.

HubSpot “Make My Persona” Tool

And now — HubSpot. If you want to create a more visual, detailed representation of your customer persona, use HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” tool. 

With this tool, you can build out different aspects of your customer persona, including:

  • Which industry do they work in?
  • What is their job title?
  • What are their goals?
  • How do they gather information for their job?

Step Three: Create Your Customer Persona

Now it’s time to put together all of the research and information you’ve gathered in steps one and two to create a complete customer persona. Start looking for common characteristics and traits and expand upon the persona you created with the HubSpot tool.

Give your persona a specific name, a job title, a geographic location — whatever you need to create a detailed description of who it is you are marketing and advertising for. Your persona should feel as much like a real person as possible.

What is the benefit of going through all of this prep work before creating your content? It’s important to think about your audience in a more tangible way, not just as a target demographic to hit. Think about their pain points. Their day-to-day challenges. Their routines. This puts you in their place, and thus yields much stronger, more pointed copy.

Step Four: Apply This Persona To Your Marketing Strategies & Content

And finally – you’re ready to create your copy! How can you go about applying your specific persona to your content strategy? Use the persona you created to also craft a very specific tone and style for your copy. A well-incorporated persona has the power to increase website traffic by 210% and organic search traffic by 55%. 

Even with this strong persona in mind, marketers still have certain challenges when it comes to creating effective content. With this in mind, we have a few key insights to help you guide your next piece of copy — regardless of your customer persona.

While customer personas deeply shape the tone and style of your copy, it’s also important to nail down some of the basics of strong copy to then build off of next. And it’s this next part that gets tricky. You might have strong marketing copy, but how can you be certain that it fits perfectly for your specific audience? Anyword has already solved that problem.

Tailor Your Copy With Anyword

As we can see, creating customer personas proves challenging for even the most seasoned marketers. It’s time consuming and tricky to get right the first time. With the steps we’ve outlined above, that process becomes more digestible and streamlined. But what happens once you have a clearly defined personas and no copy to go along with it? That’s where Anyword steps in.

Anyword’s AI Copywriting Platform allows you to create different Customer Personas based on your target audience. 

And what does this mean for you? Skip the guesswork and generate copy with your specific customer base in mind. College students? Recent retirees? Dog owners? Whatever your target customers may be, tell Anyword and get tailored copy in just a few clicks.

Use these Customer Personas across all applicable formats to help streamline and tailor your copy to your audience!

Predictive Analytics with Anyword

And to take your perfectly-tailored content even further, use Anyword’s predictive analytics to determine which pieces of content will perform best. With each piece of copy generated using Anyword’s Data-Driven Use Cases, you’ll receive a unique Predictive Performance Score. These “grades” indicate a specific piece of copy’s performance potential, giving you an idea of how well it will perform before you even go live.

And want to double check that your content is hitting the mark for your customer persona? In addition to using the Customer Personas feature, simply hover over the Predictive Performance Score, and you’ll see even more insights. This score panel gives you a look into which audience demographics will best resonate with your content. Use this as a way to double, triple check that the content you’re promoting aligns with your target persona.

To learn more about how Anyword helps marketers of all shapes and sizes fine-tune and tailor their content for specific audiences, book a demo today and see for yourself.

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