Winning Customer Personas From Real Brands to Inspire You
A version of this post was included in my super-fun weekly email for marketers with tips, tricks and stories.
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I don’t know if you’ve heard me tell this story in an email, blog, or social media post before. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll tell it again for two reasons.
First off, it’s a terrific marketing story with an interesting “plot twist” that I think you’ll find interesting. Everyone loves a good story, right? Second, I couldn’t think of any other intro piece that would do justice to the message of today’s article better than this bizarre story.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Early last year, we did a research study for a leading coffee company. One of the research methods we used had us receiving real-time, “in the moment” video recordings from customers of this coffee brand every time they brewed coffee.
While there wasn’t anything peculiar or fascinating about how these coffee lovers made their daily cups of coffee, we noticed something slightly different in one particular audience.
When it was brew o’clock, this group of customers took a trip to…
their bathroom!
Their coffee machines were (surprisingly) stashed there. They shut the door, brewed a single cup, and sipped away in the confines of those four walls while checking the news or scrolling through their social media feeds.
Not quite what you’d expect, right?!
But here’s the thing—what we learned from that study was that this particular segment of customers were moms of young children. They brewed and sipped from their bathrooms because all they wanted was 5 minutes of peace and quiet in the morning, before stepping into the day’s chaos outside those doors.
Imagine the massive success a coffee brand could enjoy when launching a marketing campaign targeted specifically at this strange-but-critical customer persona that the research team at Bixa unearthed from this study.
That’s the power of developing detailed customer personas before going to the market.
Not only that, imagine getting the messaging right for a segment that is completely embarrassed by their bathroom coffee habit. These are the data-backed details that become so important to not only knowing WHO the persona is, but also WHAT resonates with them (and what doesn’t).
This post will provide an overview of what personas are, the power behind them, and show you some examples from real brands
Keep reading too, because we’ll even offer you a free template to help you create your own persona, quickly and easily!
What Are Personas?
Personas, also sometimes referred to as Ideal Customer Avatars (ICAs), are fictional characters that represent an aggregate of the qualities of typical users within your market audience segment.
The best customer personas are an easy-to-remember cast of characters, and they usually:
Share common psychographic or behavioral traits
Represent a larger audience segment in aggregate
Have a face and/or name to humanize this target customer segment
Tell a story to help teams remember details about this audience, in an effort to help them make focused and confident customer-driven decisions
Demonstrate differences between key audience segments (e.g., emotional drivers, aspirations, top tasks)
More than anything, robust personas are based on research!
That means it’s not just your team’s assumptions driving personas—it’s actual usage or sales data, customer feedback, qualitative findings, quantitative survey data, and more!
The Power of Personas
A truly actionable customer persona will take time and effort to piece together.
At this point, some marketers will be thinking: are personas really worth the time, effort, and valuable resources? If you're thinking along those lines, the stats below (source) should help you see the power of personas.
56% of companies attribute their ability to generate higher quality leads to using buyer personas.
24% of companies agree that buyer personas help them generate more leads.
36% of companies who have shorter sales cycles point to buyer personas as the reason.
Over 90% of companies that exceed lead and revenue goals use customer persona to segment their database.
Companies that exceed lead and revenue goals are 4x as likely to use buyer personas for demand generation than those that don't.
“Yowza! I mean, why haven’t we created our personas already?”
If you’re asking yourself this question, Bixa can help. Book a strategy session here.
Samples of Winning Personas From Real Brands
Are you pumped and ready to write a persona for your business? Use the samples below to draw inspiration and make the process easier and faster:
For this particular persona, we used a feelings wheel to illustrate the specific emotional drivers for customers represented in the market segment.
Click here for a sample feelings wheel the research team at Bixa really likes (we’re also big fans of the Calm app in general!).
For this persona, we customized it based on the goals for the research—specifically business goals since this was a B2B sale, and data points they were looking for with a Tank Level Monitoring (TLM) product. Even for very niche products, personas can be helpful to understand what resonates and what doesn’t with a particular audience segment:
This following persona illustrated one of three key audience segments for a skincare company. It gets very granular about how she discovers skincare products, where she buys them, how she researches them, and the features she looks for—including details on product smell, which was of utmost importance to this audience. We also listed out favorite types of skincare products and what “feel” she described and looked for in future products.
In both this person and the previous one, you’ll note that we do report emotional drivers for purchase. This is very important because when writing messaging or copy for any marketing targeted at this audience segment, you need to know what’s going to work and what’s not going to:
You’ll notice that while some of these personas contain the basics about a customer representing a specific market segment, others go deeper to include way more details—details like exact product specs that resonate and don’t resonate with this consumer, or even words and phrases they look for in a product or on packaging!
The more data you have, the more specific you can get—which can turn your personas into extremely valuable and actionable deliverables.
In the past, we’ve even humanized personas further and paired each with recorded audio clips to represent a specific group! Knowing what an audience sounds like and the cadence and language they use can really help their stories stick into the minds of your team members—whether you’re on a marketing team, consumer insights, user experience, design thinking, or in a multifunctional department.
Conclusion
Every savvy marketer knows that getting crystal clear on the market segment a product or service aims to serve is the key to higher conversion rates.
In this article, we have explained the power behind personas and shown you real-world samples. We hope that you’ll put the information and resources we’ve provided to create actionable personas and use them to drive sales in your business.
Want more of this marketing goodness…
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If you liked this article, you might like my blog post on 5 Qualitative Research Methods + When to Use Them
Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands, including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.