17 June 2024 | By - Sudha Mariappan

If you’re running a business and you don’t understand what your customer’s preferences are, chances are you won’t be able to rise in the market.

From startups to well established brands, each one of them faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities. As the customer base depends on the business level, the challenges also fluctuate.

To know about your customers on a personal level, it is important to know about their personas, also called buyer personas. The term customer persona is a strategic tool that you can use to adjust your products and services according to your customers. This tool helps you effectively meet the expectations of your business’s ideal customer.

Using this type of tool benefits both businesses and customers.

For example, Flipkart uses customer personas to personalize their shopping experiences and optimize marketing strategies.

Let’s discuss what a customer persona is, who is your ideal customer, and how you can build an effective customer persona to better understand and engage your ideal customers.

What is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona is also known as a buyer persona. It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on the market research that you’ve done, and real data about your existing customers.

You’ll gather the details of:

Customer demographics
Customer behaviors
Motivations behind your customers
Their pain points
Their purchasing patterns

An example of this would be Myntra. It is a fashion online store that has an e-commerce website. It develops customer personas by analyzing data from their already existing user base. They gather details of their customers’ shopping behaviour, what type of fashion they prefer, and their socio-economic background. For example, their fictional persona would be:
Name: Rohit
Age: 25-year-old
Occupation: Tech professional
Location: Bangalore
Interests: Prefers casual wear and frequently shops for trendy yet affordable clothing.

So by understanding Rohit’s preferences in shopping clothes, Myntra can adjust its product recommendation when Rohit decides to open the website or their app. They also implement emotional intelligence in their marketing strategy. Whenever he opens the app and gazes at his previously bought products, he used to get similar product recommendations based on what quality and pricing he went for.

This will improve Rohit's overall user experience.

How are these personas created?

Creating such type of personas involves collecting qualitative and quantitative data from various sources. You can take customer interviews, and survey them regarding your product or service and the customer analytics.

This is the easy way to segregate your customers through age, location, and also working class factors. This is important because when you recommend a product, you’ll recommend based on the demographics of your customer base. Customer persona Creation is an important step in a variety of creative projects.

Before making a customer persona, you need to know who an ideal customer is.

Who is an Ideal Customer?

An ideal customer is that one special customer who is a perfect match for your product or service. It’s a perfect match when the customer needs to align perfectly with what your company has to offer. someone whose needs align seamlessly with what your business offers.

This individual has the privilege to take away most value from your offerings. They will get an insane amount of satisfaction by using your product. When they’re satisfied, they’ll likely return for more and show brand loyalty.

For example, FabIndia is a well-known Indian retail brand that specializes in ethnic products. They have a clear understanding of their ideal customers.

A customer persona profile of theirs would be:
Name: Priya
Age: 35-year-old
Occupation: Urban historical professional
Location: Delhi
Interests: She values traditional craftsmanship and prefers sustainable, ethically sourced products for her home and wardrobe.

As Priya's preferences and values align perfectly with FabIndia's mission of promoting Indian craftsmanship and sustainability, she is the ideal customer of FabIndia.

Your business must involve profit, which should be the ultimate goal. To achieve that, identifying your ideal customer is necessary. It should involve investigating who can be your most profitable customers who are satisfied. What common ground do they share with your company?

The basic characteristics include demographics (age, gender, income), psychographics (values, interests, lifestyle), behavioral traits (buying patterns, product usage), and geographic factors (location, climate).
By understanding these traits, You can do well in their marketing campaigns and improve your product development. This will also make customer service easier.

How to Build an Effective Customer Persona to Know Your Ideal Customer:

Step 1: Market Research is compulsory: You can start doing in-depth research by gathering vast data on your existing customers. The broader the market is, the better. When you get to know how the market works and analyze your customers accordingly, you’ll hit the jackpot.

Considering customers’ feedback is a must. Without it, you wouldn’t know what the customers’ opinions are about your product.

Also through social media, you can get to know what type of content the customer likes. Based on that, you can put forward your product on display.

For example, Zomato uses customer reviews to make their customer persona. Not only that, they gather your order history to recommend more such food according to our taste palette.

Most importantly, they use engagement metrics to create more detailed personas.

In this way, Zomato wins the hearts of people and therefore is used by millions.

With direct customer feedback, you can also add industry reports for more detailed analysis. You can add competitor analysis as knowing what your competitors are up to will help your business immensely.

A Researchers Guide to Creating Customer Personas & Buyers

Step 2: Know your customer’s key characteristics:
Now that you have collected all the data, based on that you need to identify the common characteristics and patterns that define your ideal customers. Here is the key to knowing your target customer

You might want to segregate your customers like this:
Demographic - age, gender, and income level.
Psychographic - interests, values, and lifestyle choices.

For example, Paytm segregates its customers based on various personas such as:

Customer Persona 1:
Name: Sanjay
Age: 30
Occupation: A tech expert
Location: Mumbai
Interests: Loves technology-related stuff and gadgets so open to using digital payments for everyday transactions.

Customer Persona 2:
Name: Aarti
Age: 32
Occupation: Small business owner
Location: Lucknow
Interests: Is efficient and needs easy solutions for financial transactions.
By clearly specifying these characteristics, Paytm uses Paytm to develop effective targeted marketing campaigns and user experiences that cater to the unique needs of these personas.

Step 3: Create Detailed Persona Profiles:
The final stage is where you have identified the key characteristics, and you can gather them into detailed personal profiles.

Each of the profiles you’re creating should include a name, their background story, what their motivations are, what their pain points are, and other specific details you can add about their interaction with your product or service.

This profile should be as realistic and comprehensive as possible, making it easier for your team to empathize with and understand the persona.

Here we can create a persona for Nykaa:

Name: Ananya Sharma
Age: 28
Occupation: Digital Marketing Manager
Location: Mumbai, India
Background: She has a busy work schedule and a passion for staying updated with the latest beauty trends. She likes having the best skincare products and always opts for the best ones in the market for her sensitive skin.
Interests: Her interests include skincare, working out, and traveling to new places.
Goals: Her goals are to achieve flawless skin and to stay with the latest beauty trends.
Pain points:

• Ananya has sensitive skin and cannot use any products without breaking out.
• She is overwhelmed by vast beauty choices.
• Due to her hectic schedule, she cannot run to the cosmetic store all the time.
• She needs personalized recommendations for the product suitable for her skin.

This persona shows Ananya’s preferences and the challenges she faces in finding suitable skincare for her brand. Nykaa can use this profile to provide Ananya with personalized product recommendations and use their marketing strategies to make Ananya relate to her issues and help her solve them.

Nykaa can use skincare products that are used for sensitive skin Ananya when uses Nykaa’s website. In this way, Ananya can have better customer service without having to run to the cosmetic store.

So by following these steps, you as a business can develop well rounded customer personas that will give a deep understanding of your ideal customers.

Think of it this way, your ideal customers are special, therefore they need special treatment.

This understanding will help you create more personalized and effective marketing strategies. You can develop your product by constructive criticism and improve your customer satisfaction altogether.

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