At this point in time, businesses of all sizes are turning to concrete analytics to drive their business decisions and improve overall growth. Today’s customers are used to being targeted in this way, which makes it important for brands to utilize this approach.
Creating the sense that your brand is catering specifically to each individual customer isn’t easy, but it gets easier with research. Creating a customer persona is an excellent place to start when it comes to reaching your target market. In this article, we will explore how to create your brand’s customer persona in order to better define your target market.
What is a Customer Persona?
Customer personas, often known as buyer personas, are distinct profiles that describe the individuals within your audience. These personas are a tool that is designed to help you recognize who you are marketing to—and understanding who these groups are can have a significant impact on your brand’s overall success.
A customer persona is a generalized identity that suits certain groups, but these are not just simple assumptions. Customer personas often rely on concrete data and are designed to help brands market to specific individuals. As brands grow, this becomes more important.
Most brands will start with one or two buyer personas in mind. As a brand gets bigger, they will inevitably find that more people are exposed to their brand. Having clear profiles for customer personas can allow brands to reach their customers in a more personalized way.
Before your brand can benefit from customer personas, you need to be able to create them. Each customer persona will have a different profile, then these profiles will be used to send out targeted marketing campaigns. Knowing these personas and appealing to them can increase overall audience engagement in a big way. Let’s discuss how to get started:

1. Website Trending
Trending is a crucial tool in the world of marketing and it applies here. One great way to start building customer personas is to learn from the data that is available. Your website alone should be able to offer key insights regarding your website visitors. Using this information as a place to start can be extremely helpful.
In addition to basic visitor data like page views and bounce rates, you can dive deeper by analyzing which menu items or promotions attract the most attention. For restaurants and food businesses, tracking the frequency of visits to certain menu pages or seasonal specials can reveal important trends and help to create a more detailed buyer persona and overall help your marketing efforts. For example, if you notice that a significant portion of your website traffic is focused on vegan or plant-based dishes, this might indicate that a growing part of your customer base is health-conscious or following specific dietary preferences and might be new buyer persona profile that needs to be created to help bring in new prospective customers in this space. This kind of data not only helps you create more accurate customer personas but also allows you to refine your menu offerings, pricing, and marketing to better align with your audience’s interests and behaviors.
2. Use Forms and Profiles
A great way to take this one step further is to gather data as part of a profile. If your customers make a profile on your website, you can use this as a great opportunity to find out more about them. Using general forms and questionnaires, you can get a much stronger read on your customer personas through a profile alone.

By now, the average shopper knows that brands offer individualized marketing based on the data that they have. We expect that brands will know what we keep looking at on a website or what we have tucked away in our baskets for payday—and that is a good thing. It means that more customers are becoming interested in sharing their information in order to receive that personalized experience.
Simple questionnaires that a person completes while setting up their profile can offer so much about their buyer persona. These fields can tell you when their birthday is, what they love about your brand, or even what their interests are. Every day, services like Ipsy.com use questionnaires to help send their audience products that they will love, and these individualized services are only getting more popular with time.

3. Ask for Feedback
Any time that someone interacts with your brand, you should be curious about their experience. Every audience is different, and within those audiences you will find more people who just want something different than the rest. Your goal is to get a common theme, not put every single customer into a simple box. Feedback can help with this by letting customers tell you who they are.
Lifestyle brands are leveraging feedback to create buyer personas in a great way. When they send out products, particularly mixed products like a subscription box, they always ask for feedback on each individual product. This information is used to tailor the experience for each person—and it allows these brands to make a wonderful buyer persona. Over time, this data can be used to meet the needs of individual customers more quickly than ever.
To ask for feedback, you want to tailor the experience, and it can be helpful to offer some kind of incentive. Some brands thrive on feedback requests, but other brands need to bring a bit more to the table. Through emails, pop-ups, and website forms, ask your audience what they want to see. Their answers can help you to meet their needs more effectively.
4. Learn From Your Team
No one knows better about the interests of a customer than your employees. The individuals who regularly interact with customers will always have a much better gauge on what your customers want. These are the individuals who will hear customers talking and see how certain items never seem to move off the shelves.

Asking your team for feedback can be incredibly beneficial, particularly when there are themes. While some feedback might be specific to one person, in most cases there will be common trends hidden within the information. Using this information can often help you to hear both the best and the worst from different individuals—and that is useful. Knowing what people love and hate about your brand can help you to tailor your approach and adapt your business as needed.
5. Segment Your Audience by Behavior
A key part of developing a customer persona involves analyzing your customers’ behaviors. Customer behaviors tell a lot about their interests, needs, and priorities. By looking at how your audience engages with your brand, you can find new opportunities to market to them. For instance, tracking the behavior of users on your website can help you discover trends in the way they navigate the site, which products they are most interested in, and how often they visit before making a purchase. These behavioral patterns allow you to create profiles for users who are casual visitors, impulse buyers, or repeat customers. This segmentation enables you to create a more tailored approach to marketing, so you can serve different types of customers according to their specific engagement levels.
Similarly, for brick-and-mortar stores, understanding in-store behaviors can provide insights into your customers’ personas. Which products are they gravitating toward? What times are they most likely to visit? Gathering this kind of information allows you to adjust your in-store marketing, ensuring that you are meeting the needs of the primary customer personas for that location.
6. Leverage Social Media Insights
Social media platforms are a goldmine of information when it comes to identifying and creating customer personas. Not only do they allow you to track the demographics and behaviors of your followers, but they also provide direct insight into your audience’s values, hobbies, and daily lives.
Most social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and X, offer built-in analytics tools. These tools can show you the age, gender, and location of your followers, as well as the types of posts they engage with the most. With this information, you can build customer personas based on the interests and preferences of your social media audience.
Additionally, paying attention to comments, likes, and shares on your posts can help you understand which content resonates most with your audience to help with the buyer persona. For instance, if you run a coffee shop and consistently see high engagement on posts about sustainability, it’s a strong indicator that eco-conscious customers are a big part of your audience so getting eco-friendly cups for your to-go customers might be the best next move for your business. You can then create a customer persona for this group and tailor your messaging, product offerings, and advertising to appeal to their values.
Don’t forget to take advantage of social listening tools to track mentions of your brand outside of your own posts. This will give you a broader picture of how your brand is perceived and what kinds of people are talking about it. These insights are invaluable when crafting customer personas that accurately reflect your market.
7. Use Data Analytics Tools for Deeper Insights
While social media insights and feedback from your team are great starting points for building customer personas, data analytics tools take things to the next level. Advanced data analytics tools provide deeper insights into your existing customers behavior and preferences, allowing businesses to identify trends that aren’t always immediately visible.
By leveraging these tools, you can gather detailed data about your customers’ journey, from their first interaction with your brand to their latest purchase. This data can be invaluable in understanding the different touch points that matter to various customer segments for your buyer persona. Whether it’s Google Analytics or more specialized tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce or using a service like PLUS Restaurant Solutions’ analytics, these platforms can offer a treasure trove of information that informs your buyer personas.
For example, if your data shows that a segment of your audience consistently purchases products around a particular time of year (like holidays), you can create a seasonal buyer persona. This persona can help you design targeted marketing campaigns and develop a marketing strategy that appeal to these seasonal customers, increasing your chances of driving sales during those times.
Similarly, customer lifetime value (CLV) analysis can reveal patterns that indicate your most valuable customers. With this data, you can develop personas that focus specifically on high-value customers, enabling you to craft VIP programs, exclusive offers, or personalized marketing strategies that increase customer retention.
8. Create Multiple Customer Personas
Once you’ve gathered enough data from website trends, social media insights, analytics, and team feedback, it’s time to create a buyer persona, multiple customer personas to be more detailed. While it might seem easier to focus on one or two general profiles, in reality, most businesses have several distinct customer groups and ideal customer. Each persona should represent a different segment of your audience, allowing you to tailor your marketing messages more effectively.
Create detailed buyer personas profiles for each persona. Include demographic information like age, gender, income, location, and education level, but also dive deeper into their behaviors, interests, pain points, and purchasing motivations. You can even give each persona a name to make them feel more real and help your team easily remember them.
The following are some buyer persona examples, if you run a restaurant or food business, you might have the following personas:
- Health-Conscious Hannah: A 30-year-old professional who prioritizes nutritious, wholesome meals. She frequently looks for organic or gluten-free options and values restaurants that offer transparency in their ingredients.
- Convenience-Seeking Carl: A 45-year-old father of three who prefers quick, affordable meals for his family. He values convenience and often orders takeout or delivery from restaurants that have user-friendly online ordering systems.
- Foodie Frank: A 25-year-old culinary enthusiast who loves trying new dishes and exploring local food scenes. He’s active on social media, often sharing his dining experiences and looking for restaurants with unique, trendy offerings.
These personas help a restaurant craft tailored marketing strategies to better serve each customer group’s specific preferences.
9. Adapt Your Personas Over Time
Customer personas are not static. As your business grows and market trends shift, the characteristics of your target audience may also change. That’s why it’s important to regularly review and update your customer personas to ensure they remain relevant and accurate.
Take time every few months to revisit your personas. Check to see if any trends have changed, if new customer groups have emerged, or if your marketing campaigns are still resonating with your intended audience. If needed, update your personas to reflect these changes. This will keep your marketing fresh and ensure that your business continues to meet the needs of your audience.
A great way to adapt your personas is by continuously gathering data. Use customer feedback, data analytics, and social media insights to track how your audience is evolving. For instance, a new product release might attract a different type of customer that you hadn’t previously considered. If you notice a trend, it might be worth developing a new persona to capture that audience.
10. Putting Your Customer Personas to Work
Once you’ve developed and refined your customer personas, it’s time to put them to work. These personas should guide every aspect of your marketing and business strategy, from content creation to product development to customer service.
For marketing campaigns, refer to your personas to ensure your messaging is relevant. Tailor your email marketing, social media posts, and ad campaigns to the preferences, needs, and pain points of each persona. For example, if you’re running a promotion on eco-friendly products, make sure your messaging speaks directly to your environmentally conscious customers.
When developing new products or services, consider how each persona would respond. Ask yourself whether a new product appeals to one or more of your personas, and if not, whether it’s worth developing at all. You can even use your personas to create more personalized customer service experiences. For instance, a customer service team member could reference a persona’s key characteristics to anticipate common questions or concerns during a live chat interaction.
How to Build A Customer Persona That Helps Your Business
Buyer personas are an invaluable tool that every brand should be using. Whether you choose to gather your own data or you partner with a company that has been collecting information for years, you want to use the information that is available. Every customer is different, but some customers are more similar than you think. By exploring these similarities, you can find a way to reach your audience in an exciting new way. Your customers will always appreciate the extra effort—and they will love feeling like you truly know them.
In addition to creating a more personalized marketing approach, when you create customer personas you also help streamline your business operations by aligning your product development, sales strategy, and customer support with the needs of your target customer. When your entire team understands who your ideal and prospective customers are, they can better tailor their efforts to meet those customers’ expectations. This results in more cohesive, consistent experiences across all touch points, which fosters trust and loyalty. Ultimately, building accurate customer personas not only enhances your marketing efforts but also strengthens your brand’s overall relationship with its customers, leading to long-term growth and success.
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