How to create a customer persona (with added personality)

Caravan Creative Customer Persona.png

When you talk to everyone, you talk to no one. So get specific about who you’re talking to in your marketing copy with a fully fleshed out customer persona with added personality.

What’s a customer persona, you ask? It’s a snapshot of your ideal customer, from the lifestyle they live down to the kinds of problems they’re dealing with. In particular the kinds of problems that your brilliant business offers a solution to.

Getting down to the nitty gritty of who you’re talking to helps to narrow right down to the very specific wants and needs of the person that your product or service is designed to help. This means that when you craft your social media captions and sales page copy, you’re addressing the things that stand between your ideal customer and your product or service.

It’s common that when people first start out in business, their marketing messaging is broad. They want to target everyone out of a fear that they’ll turn business away by targeting a specific market. This often results in a hotchpotch of customer types who buy on price, rather than because your version of this thing they want is incredible and the best fit for them.

There are of course exceptions to this. If what you offer is a product for everyone, like Coca Cola, then your target customer is very broad. 

But you can bet your last rum n’ coke that even in the massive marketing machine that turns the cogs of the Coca Cola company, that they have customer personas carved out for the many product lines, activations, sponsorship and events that happen each year under their name.

If you’re a small business owner and you’ve made this thing of beauty with a certain type of person in mind, that is exactly who you need to get clear on.

But worry not, getting specific doesn’t mean ‘other people’ won’t buy from you too. It just means that you’re getting your message out to the people who want to buy from you most. The very people this thing of yours was made for.

Working out who your ideal customer is is deep work. And it’s essential to knowing what to say, who to say it to, and where to say it.

A quick Google and you’ll find numerous free, generic customer persona or ideal customer worksheets online to get you started.

But if you want to really dig down into the heart and soul of your ideal customer in a way that’s relatable and based on real humans, this is something I walk you through in my coaching program or one-hour coaching session.


 

If you’re hashtagging on the hop because sitting down to create a hashtag strategy feels like too much work, then I’ve got something for you in the Shop 👉🏼

Joanna Sim