What is a customer persona?
Customer personas are a helpful tool to understand a startup's customers and target audience. We recommend them as a great task to help startups with their process of market validation.
When developing a customer persona, it helps to think of one specific customer (and name them), rather than a stereotype (plus, it’s more fun that way). If you are unsure who your customer is- this blog may be helpful.
Why do we use them?
Customer personas ask you to personalise your target customer so that you can have them at the front of your mind when making any decisions. Some of these can include:
Product development - By understanding the needs and motivations of your customer, you can design a product or service that works for them. By constantly referring back to the customer persona you can create something that is relevant, valuable, and meets their needs.
Customer experience - Customers may have unique expectations, or prefer a specific look and feel of a product or service. By understanding them you can create personalised experiences that resonate with them.
Marketing - By understanding your customer, where they consume media, who they go to for information, and their desires and pain points, you can create impactful marketing material and design a way to get it in front of these people.
General decision-making - whether looking at pricing strategies, distribution channels, or making your first sales, you can refer back to the customer persona to help guide these decisions.
Additionally, we know it’s tempting, but try to not google “customer personas”, the results are pretty average, can be misleading and for the most part, they only represent ‘marketing’ personas.
The Dos and Don’ts of Customer Personas:
Do
Do research, and find someone with your problem.
Focus on behaviours and motivations.
Use real customer insights.
Test your assumptions if you’re going to make them.
Don’t
Don’t base your persona on assumptions.
Do not stereotype or generalise.
What should I ask?
Demographics
Age, gender, location, occupation, income, education.
Pain points
What are they trying to do? What do they see (what's in the marketplace), Of the pain points, what level of pain/annoyance is it? How urgent is the problem?
Personality
What do they say? What do they do? What are they thinking and feeling? What do they want/ their desires? What are their fears/anxieties? What are their goals?
Personal Preferences
Do they watch tv? On what platforms? What do they listen to? Radio/ podcasts/ music how do they access it? Where do they find their information? What events do they attend? Where do they spend time offline? Where do they spend time online?
Check out our TikTok on Customer personas
If you get stuck…
Customer personas are an important step along the startup research journey, but they can be a little tricky sometimes if you’re not sure where to start, or who to talk to first.
That’s where we can help. If you’re working on an idea - no matter if it’s big, small, old, new, or half-baked - let us know. We’d love to meet with you to find your next steps and see how we can help support you.