How to create customer personas
A company can never know its customers too well; that’s why an increasing number are creating fictional – yet amazingly accurate - personas to guide their sales and marketing efforts.Companies are developing personas because they understand customers can’t be reduced to broad demographics – e.g., average age, education, ethnicity, family status – nor statistics. They intuitively understand the value of visualizing their audience better to sell and serve them. But rather than trying to know each and every customer (an impossible task for most), companies get to know the handful of proxies who represent them.
Meet Molly. She’s 34, with a BA in business from a state university. Molly’s married, with two kids ages three and five. She cares about nutrition and runs as often as she can, sometimes competitively. She drives a mid-sized SUV, is into photography and social networking (Facebook especially). Molly works at an international consumer products company (athletic footwear, clothing) in the IT department where she manages security. She’s professional, appealing and straightforward, but sometimes harried and impatient. Molly wants to stay on top of the latest technology to reduce her company’s data risks while keeping internal constituents happy. She’s sometimes overwhelmed by the diversity of security options out there and appreciates helpful perspective and clarity.
Personas start with generalities like these and then get more specific to bring the representative character to life. They include demographic data and other characterizing elements such as career concerns, personalities, attitudes, motivations and objectives.
Here are 11 tips for getting started:
- Convene a group of employees who interact with your customers and prospects, e.g., customer service, support, salespeople, channel partners and senior executives – those on the front lines. Gather their perspective but be wary of internal bias or myopia.
- Conduct customer/prospect research including in-person meetings as well as phone-based interviews and online surveys. Tag along on in-person sales calls. Look for consistent patterns; common needs, expectations, frustrations, opinions and psychological motivators.
- Reconvene and propose a few archetypal personas. How many personas do you need? There’s no single number of personas that works best. Go with whatever number accurately captures the major categories of customers; keep the total number as manageable as possible. Four to six are typical for most B2B companies.
- Describe the category of company each works for; characteristics could potentially include: industry, size, vertical market, competitive environment, type of employer, and corporate culture.
- Describe the person at the workplace to get a full, rounded picture of who this person represents. This should include demographic data; job title and focus; challenges they face; how the person fits within their organization; their role in the buying cycle; key questions they’d ask you; trigger words that would invoke a helpful reaction; skillset/competency levels; key job objectives and responsibilities; attitudes; key behaviors; what would make their job more effective; how their time is typically spent, etc.
Image credit: Image credit: L + E (Logic + Emotion) http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ - Describe the person outside the workplace – how they dress; what food they like; hobbies; habits; type of car; education; interests; and psychological attributes.
- Find the areas of commonality and bring these all together under one persona. Create personas for each major customer grouping. Reach consensus agreement.
- Describe them; find a photo; name the customer; give him/her an age, title.
- Frame marketing messages, think about the marketing resources this persona might tap to learn more about your type of offerings/services/products, e.g. white papers, articles, Web sites, news releases, speakers, online communities, events, Twitter, etc.
- Think about the way each persona will guide different functional areas within your company. Engage key players so they embed this unifying view of the customer in their own decision making and day-to-day activities in sales, marketing, HR, communications, finance, etc.
- Update and modifypersonas as real-world insight unfolds.
You don’t have to work for AIG, GM or Peanut Corp. of America to face a crisis. Every company – no matter what size, whether public or private – faces them. While the scale may be different compared to these corporate giants, crises happen all the time.
Build the crisis response team; get an adequate number of professionals involved. Prepare content. Identify all your organization’s publics, not just the obvious ones. Figure out how and where you’ll establish information centers. Identify the chain of communication for crisis notification. Predetermine the way you’ll assemble the team. Constantly train the team by simulating various crises; practice the plan once or twice a year and modify as needed; change scenarios each time. Look for things that don’t work; refine the process. 
Tip # 8 – protect the record. Monitor everything that’s said and written including social media. Have a system in place to correct incorrect facts to avoid recirculation of erroneous information. Make sure your organization gets public credit for positive actions taken to address the crisis.
