Guide | How to Create a Brand Persona in 6 Steps

In this article, we will cover how to build a cohesive persona for brand success through a six step process and supportive worksheets. If you’re not certain if you need this for your business, or you want to learn more about how your business can be supported by a cohesive brand persona, please read the FAQ article on brand persona.?

Through this exercise, we are using your specific customer data, to intentionally develop your brand persona, defining your company’s character, and empowering your customers through removing friction from their brand experiences. If you are using this article for its true purposes, to get the best result from the reading, I highly suggest downloading the worksheets at the bottom of this page, using the exercises for each step, and grabbing paper and a pen to take notes. You should also be able to use the worksheets on a tablet, or your mobile. If you need support with these exercises, please contact me on the +ABOUT page, or schedule a call. I’d be happy to give you a quick walk through session. If you need more help, or you’d like me to complete this process for your business or your personal brand, please complete the intake forms, and let’s hop on a call.?

For now, let’s get into the process!?

To create a persona, there are roughly 6 steps:?

1. Understand your customers vs. your consumers..* (Please see notes.)
2. Curate intentional customer personas for each target market or buyer group.
3. Evaluate where your buyer groups align and depart from each other.?
4. Develop an applicable brand persona that meshes well with all of them.?
5. Create clear guidelines on how the persona shows up, where it shows up, and when it shows up, AND test it out!
6. Achieve persona consistency across all business functions and platforms.

Grab those worksheets and your note pages, let’s go!

1 | Understand your customers.

Understanding your customers is about more than how much they purchase. When you are getting to know your customers, or researching your target customers, you will need to use your consumer data to derive answers to the following questions:

• Who are my customers? What are the easily identifiable buyer grouping trends ( ie. Buyers in a specific location, referred from another website, referred from a specific influencer, etc.) among my consumers?
• What motivates my buyers to buy my products? What problem does my product/company/brand solve?
• Where are my consumers and buyers physically and digitally? What age/generation/gender do my buyers and consumers identify with??
• How are they introduced to my brand?Where do they continually see or interact with my brand??
• How do my consumers and customers engage with my brand online and physically, before, during, and after purchase?
• What questions do my buyers and audience ask frequently??
• What aligned products do my buyers purchase from me, my competition, or aligned sellers?
• At which stage in the purchase journey (article coming soon!) do my customers engage with my brand? What is the final action before a purchase?

You may already have an intuitive idea of your buyer groups. Excellent - We will use that as a starting point. If you are just starting in your business, and have limited sales, you would use that intuitive idea as a starting point for this process. Using that intuitive idea, you’ll develop a simple and flexible persona that shifts as you continue to collect data on your buyers, your largest addressable market** and your target markets*** (article coming soon!), through more sales and customer data.

If you already have sales and a customer roster, the best way to get informed of your customer groups and personas, is by reviewing all of your customer datasets, as they are available to you. Customer data sources may include Google Analytics, your payment processing software (Stripe, Paypal, Square, Squarespace), social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc.), and your CRM software (Mailchimp, Salesforce, Microsoft AX, Hubspot, Zoho, etc.). Digging into the customer data in these areas can be supportive to your understanding of your customers, and ultimately help you answer the questions above.?

If you are digging into your data sources, and you are not able to find the answers, start with qualitative customer data. This data is the non-numerical data points of customer user experience. This can come from messages and comments on social media posts, customer support request emails from customers, and direct conversations from customers. For example, you may have a buyer that purchases a product, and after purchase, they use Facebook messenger to ask a support question. There are at least 6 points of data from that one interaction, and while it is only one interaction, it can still be a helpful starting point. After gathering those data points, take time to examine them all, and try to find patterns. For example, if consumers ask about product features before checking out the product on your website. That could mean you need to have more informative content on your page, or maybe an FAQ page on your website. The informative content could mean that you can save time and avoid giving repetitive information. The FAQ page could mean that attaining the clickthrough to your company site has less friction, and curious consumers are likely to explore and maybe convert to customers.

If you have great customers, and a roster but no data, or lots of data, but you don’t have a handle on analyzing data, you may also get direct information from your customers, or a trusted group of your buyers. With those customers, it may be helpful to conduct a research study through a compensated survey. If you decide to use a small group of buyers, you may offer them a discount, a free product or service in return for in-depth feedback, in the form of a focus group or a simple qualitative survey. All buyers are motivated by free items. Feedback can also be in the form of an emailed survey among previous customers, a direct phone interview, or a focus group. If you decide to use this route of customer research, you will get helpful direct information, and be able to put it to use immediately.

An additional upside of direct data collection is that you may get information that goes beyond your current understanding of your customers. They may surprise you with ways to use your product that you never thought of, or differing motivations for purchase. A short survey example is shown below. It is okay if you cannot get answers for every question- any unanswered questions can be filled in with educated guesses, while you keep your eyes open for answers to other questions. ?

The answers to these questions will be put to work in the next step.?

Questions for Customer Research:

The *OR* options are edited to reflect a modern and more brand-lead approach.

What is your age? *OR*What generation do you identify with?

What is your education level?

Where do you live? *OR* What neighborhood/locale type (ie. suburb, city, countryside, etc.)?

How many people are in your household? Whom do you live with? *OR* Who else lives in your household with you?

What is your occupation? *OR* What is your current career?

What are your primary activities on a typical workday? Weekend?

Why do you buy our products? *OR* What motivated you to purchase our products?

What do you value most?

What are your goals in using our products?*OR* Why do you use our products?

2 | Curate intentional customer personas for each buyer group and/or target market.?

If you know where to look, and the data wrangling is easy for you, use your data to answer the questions above, and complete the downloadable customer persona worksheet below. If your brand or company is only marketing one product to one group of people, one buyer persona may be enough. However, if you are selling one product to multiple buyer groups, or if you have multiple products for varied customer groups, you may be better off building multiple personas. If that is the case, start with as many customer personas as you are *comfortable* with and keep it simple. If you need help here, two to three persona profiles can be a good starting point. Print as many worksheets as you have customer groups, and answer the questions for each group. Take note of the group details that overlap. There also may be no detail overlap, at all. Whichever the case, you will still be able to form a cohesive and consistent brand persona. For example, if your company sells a fully customizable meal planning service dependent on the customer’s goals, you may sell to a buyer group that identifies with being fitness models or weight-lifting, in the competitive arena. You may have another group that uses your service to lose weight or maintain their weight goals. The specific motivations of these groups are different, however, both groups are purchasing your services to better maintain their health. Using our previous meal planning service example, your brand persona may interact using a brand value of inspiration, through speaking life into the goals of our customers, while using two separate types of content. One type of content may support weight-loss customers using Pinterest, and the other may serve competitive weight-training customers on bodybuilding.com. This is just one example of many. Onto the next step!

3 | Consider where your buyer groups align and depart from each other.?

Now you should be clear on your customer groups, their similarities and differences. Write down all the similarities and differences. The similarities that you find are the basis for creating the brand persona that reaches the breadth of your largest addressable audience, and interacts with your consumers and customers. The differences that you have found create clarity on how to interact with your varied audiences and how to create awareness on your varied applicable platforms. This may seem like a departure from consistency. It isn’t, really. Think of your platforms as acting as the many faces of your brand. Consider that most people don’t show up in the same way in every they exist in. Instead, many people may shift their physical appearance, personality, conversational subject matter, or even language for the setting they are in. If applied carefully, your brand can do this, too. Developing a multi-faceted brand persona can ensure that your brand and products reach your largest addressable audience, through creating awareness and interest among multiple groups. Again, using the meal planning service as an example, language, and imagery on LinkedIn may focus on easy, healthy lunch kits for working professionals that require limited prep time, while language on TikTok may dive into the joy of cooking, the inspiration behind the meal, ways to personalize the eating experience, or the macro-influencers that are loving the kit, and how they incorporate the meals into their schedule.?

4 | Develop an applicable persona that meshes well with all of them.?

Once you develop your customer personas and understand their differences, and similarities, you will have more specific and helpful insight about who, how, when, and where to market your products to. With that insight, you may already be able to see parts of the brand persona peaking out, or be able to fully curate your entire persona. Use the information that you have gathered to complete the brand persona worksheet, and review what you have. You should be clear on the energy that your persona exudes, the mission in every interaction, and the subject matter that will be covered in public communications. The worksheet, should also make it clear which platforms you should be involved in, and what content you produce in those spaces.?

If you are faltering with the persona embodiment that can serve your clientele base, consider using the information that you have, keeping a shortlist of subject-matter coverage guidelines, staying customer centered, and developing more data points to roll out as you develop your sales. A few major keys for developing persona:

• Get clear on what values your brand persona exudes and be specific about how your company’s public face (language, visuals, etc.) illustrates those values.?
• Get clear on the goal of the persona, and what success of that goal would manifest as, for each customer group, inclusively.?
• Consider how your users experience your brands, as they move from platform to platform. Consider what consistency and seamlessness would manifest in that process.?
• Bonus: Consider how you can automate these changes, so they are easier to enact for your brand. An example may be writing a standard, branded customer service script for opening a support ticket, that helps your customer know that their ticket has been opened and their issue is now being serviced. This can be delivered by a chat bot, or by a customer service associate, whichever is better for your business. Check out a non-exhaustive list of easily-adoptable automations that you can enact for your business, below.?

Easily adoptable automations for small businesses:

Automations reduce friction in your customer’s experience, and add value along your customer journey. All of them are not necessary. Introduce automations based on your business goals. Bonus: add them one at a time to properly track results of the automations.

?? Chatbot service support | Available on most website configurations and some social platforms (ie. Facebook)

?? Feedback & Referral requests | This can be a simple workflow automation, specific to repeat buyers.

?? Segmented Email Series | Personalization based on customer journey stage adds value.

?? SMS Series Segmented Automations | This is another value add opportunity.

?? Content Scheduling | Reduce friction through a simplified social system and automation.

?? Abandoned Cart Reminders | Available for most E-Commerce platforms

?? Forms & Onboarding Automation | Handle the onboarding and intake without lifting a finger.

5. Create clear guidelines on how the persona shows up, where it shows up, and when it shows up, AND test it out!

If you have something workable already, start using it and experimenting with it. The roll out does not have to be emphasized, or even publicly announced. However if you decide to roll out your persona with a public introduction, it can provide a valuable source of information through client feedback. In this process, you may explain to your audience the facets of your persona, your values, and mission, and in that post, you can directly ask for client feedback to get clarity on if your persona is? successful in creating reliable and representative branded interactions. Once the persona has been in use for a trial period, you may directly ask if your clientele feels more or less directly connected to your brand, and how retable your content and copy feel to them.?

If you should decide against directly spotlighting your persona update, but you still want a thorough brand experience complete a touchpoint audit, using the touchpoint audit worksheet in the list of free worksheets below. A touchpoint audit is an account of every time your customer comes in contact with your brand whether that interaction is internally or externally designed, purposely or not purposely. You’ll also consider the entire journey that your consumers and customers take, from the first time they see your product, through to purchase, and support and repurchase. Once you complete that audit, consider how your company persona is currently illustrated in each customer action. Have you created a cohesive experience? Are there any parts that don’t align well? If so, how can you redevelop them to fit? As an example, consider one of the most well-known brands in the world, Apple. They designed a brand experience that revolves around empowering their customers to get the full use of their sleek products, through engineering them for simplicity. Apple engineered that simplicity and ease into every touchpoint, and branded internal interaction. This is also the case with Google, IKEA, and most other successful international brands.?

To test your brand persona, decide whether to roll out your persona gradually or cohesively. From there, once your brand persona is in use on all platforms, use it steadily on all platforms for one to three months. If your business is located in the United States, consider starting the roll out in the second fiscal quarter, from April to June. For the United States, this time period is typically fairly low on national and international holidays, and data and sales results should not be inflated by consumer holidays. If that timing does not apply to your economic environment or business, review your calendar, and find the three month period with the least consumer-based holidays. For the purposes of trialing your brand persona, this distinction applies to holidays where there may be a lot of purchases, party preparation, etc. on a national scale. These holidays tend to inflate profits and engagement across platforms. We want to avoid that to see the actual effects of the updated brand persona.

To understand the result of the persona, review your internal data sources (ie. Google Analytics, Hubspot, Mailchimp, Squarespace, Stripe, etc., and all the others we’ve mentioned in step one!), making sure to review the effects on sales and marketing engagement each month. Compare the first month’s data to the final month’s data. Also compare this year’s data from your sales and marketing data from the same period last year, using the previous year as the control group. Take note of the changes that occurred using the “Results/Analysis” worksheet.

Indicate the changes that occurred. As you review the results, you may see an increase in sales, in digital marketing engagement, user generated content, less customer support emails, or any other set of new performance indicators. The effects will depend on the shifts you made in your business, as will your initial goals and indicators of success, that you made during step 1.

As you review that area of the worksheet, ask yourself what was successful and what was not. Take note of the issues arose and the shifts to be made to resolve the issues. Note this information in your brand persona review worksheet. I personally would apply my changes after the first three month persona trial to ensure the best potential for measuring accurate differences in results. However, as stated previously, you are the boss, if you want to shift the persona within that first three month period- DO IT.?

6 | Achieve persona consistency across all business functions and platforms.

My best recommendation to keep your brand persona consistent is to continue developing your brand persona, and current through keeping it fresh. This can be relatively simple as you can choose how your brand navigates your industry, as well as the environment that your business exists in- however with daily shifts in the current, fiscal, political, and social climate, it may get a little more complex.?

If you outlined your persona’s ‘subject-matter’ coverage in the worksheet, that’s an excellent start, but there will consistently be new things that matter to your audiences that you, as the persona developer, will need to decide whether your brand persona needs to have a voice on. In these moments, it can be valuable to stay agile, and allow your brand to chime in when it’s important. Continually update that subject-matter area. For my own brands, I complete persona check-ins and audit at the top of my fiscal year, and develop changes with any fundamental business shifts (ie. New products or service introduction, new leadership, new business policies, etc.). Again, you are the boss.?

Now, you should have a tested and true brand persona. Check out the final sheet and fill in the simplified guidelines worksheet.?

Original post and supplemental materials available HERE!