14 Jun How to Build Client Personas
When we are selecting a target market, we need both quantitative data (all the quantities and amounts) and qualitative. This is open-ended, exploratory, non-numerical research. It gives richer insights. From these insights, we can make a meaningful connection with our client.
What are Client Personas?
A Client Persona is a fictional representation of the demographics, psychographics, attitudes, challenges and needs of a customer.
Client Personas are based on both real evidence from interviews and conversations, as well as some educated speculation.
It is usually necessary to create a Client Persona for each type of client that exists in your market. This allows you to group certain customers into buckets or ‘types’. This is also known as segmentation.
Our personas are not something we make publicly available or share outside our business. They are internal tools to help guide us in our business services and marketing decisions.
What value are Client Personas?
By ‘personifying’ your customers into an archetype (or ‘avatar’) it is much easier for us to feel that we are speaking directly to a person. This helps us to remain sensitive and aware of their underlying motivations and needs.
Our product or service needs to connect with our client in a meaningful way.
Ideally, it our brand needs to help bridge a gap between how they see themselves and how they want to see themselves. Or, it needs to be the bridge between their goal and their struggle.
A Trusted Friend
Our brand needs to speak to her (the Persona) as a Trusted Friend and Confidante.
How to do research for our Client Personas
There are websites that can help in developing these personas, in terms of tastes and habits. If you have a Twitter following, go to Analytics > Users > and you will see a collection of data about preferences. Also, Statista has international data, and there are many others.
If you are using existing customers or targeted people who fit the profile, the best kinds of deep research for this are not focus groups. There are all sorts of dynamics that work across groups like this and usually involve one person dominating the conversation, with others, meekly nodding in agreement or withdrawing completely.
It is better to do this kind of exploratory research on a one-to-one basis. Listen deeply. It need not be a formal interview, it could be a conversation.
Depth Interviews may help unlock deep-seated psychological drivers that may be unspoken
Client Persona Questions
Download the template Download Worksheet
- Name
- Age
- Locality
- Living situation (married, children, with parents, alone)
- Health situation
- Personality
- Career/Job
- Education level
- Hobbies and interests
- What media do they consume?
Self-Concept
- How do they see themselves?
- How would they LIKE to see themselves?
Goals and Challenges
- CHALLENGES: what is a daily challenge? What is a deeper fear?
- What is their LIFE GOAL?
Thinking about your Product, Service or Category
- What are their NEEDS (functionally and emotionally)?
- What is important to them in your category?
- How can your product help them achieve their life goal or remove the challenge/frustration?
Make the Persona
Next, give them a Name and a Face.
Give them a voice and their own words e.g. use first-person.
By diving under the surface of demographics and thinking about how Rebecca sees herself and would like to see herself, we can use our offering to bridge that gap
Your Turn: Client Personas
Build your own client personas for your one, two or three archetypical clients. Remember, these should each be different in that they are the human embodiment of a specific type of need.
Photo by Bruce Mars on Pexels