Why Customer Personas are Essential for Your Small Business

Have you ever tried writing copy for a landing page or caption and hated what you typed? When I first started my biz, I could write captions for my friends, clients, literally anyone else! But for my own content writing? I just couldn’t do it and it’s because I didn’t know who I was talking to. For clients? I knew their customers. I knew who their ideal audience was. But for my own audience? I was trying to speak to EVERYONE instead of SOMEONE. Not knowing who your target audience really can hurt your business. That’s why you should create Customer Personas for your small business.

Creating Customer Persona profiles will help you identify exactly who you serve. I’m sure you’ve been to an online training or have read an article where someone explains why you MUST niche down. When you niche down you’re able to know exactly who you’re talking to, which makes writing content to your ideal audience 10,000 times easier. You’re selling products or services to someone who needs those products or services. If you’re a photo editor? One of your ideal customers is probably a photographer. But if you’re a photographer… Who are you a photographer for?

What is a Customer Persona?

Customer personas are semi-fictitious profiles that represent your ideal customers/clients. They’re a guide you can use when writing your marketing copy, or who you’re thinking about when creating a new product or service. So, how do you create a customer persona for your small business? I’ve created this workbook to help you identify your brand’s customer personas.

Why Customer Personas are Essential

Using customer personas for your small business will help you understand and empathize with your customers. By understanding your customers you will do a better job at acquiring and serving them. If you work with a team, having these personas in place will keep everyone on the same page and creating for the same audience.

Related Post: Social Media Content Calendar Template 

Where to Start:

Research Who Already Interacts with Your Business

Who currently engages with your content, products, or services? Observe who already engages with your products or services by viewing your website analytics (Google Analytics!), social media following, in-person interactions with customers on-location, and through a Client Relationship Management software you may already have in place (like Dubsado). Are your ideal customers working parents? College students? Take note of who you find already interacts with your business, this info will help you identify your ideal customer.

Fill Out this FREE Customer Personas Workbook

This customer personas workbook has fill-in-the-blanks for all of the info you should include for each of your customer personas. This workbook will guide you through identifying your ideal customer’s demographics, professional background, challenges, motivations, goals and more. Knowing this about your ideal customers will help you relate to them and you will find it much easier talking to someone vs. everyone.

You can print it out or edit the PDF and save it to your desktop! I wanted to make this extremely easy for you to utilize, so that you can start creating content for the right audience right away. 

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE WORKBOOK

Now what?

Start writing to your personas! Keep it simple and do NOT be vague. Now that you’ve defined your target audience using customer persona profiles, you’ll be able to reach your ideal customer clearly.

Use words like “you” instead of “everyone”. Write to the person, not to the “everybody” who might be reading your copy!

Utilize / Update Your Content Calendar

When I implemented a content calendar into my workflow, my social media game literally changed. I went from 0 to 300,000 monthly Pinterest viewers real quick. You can learn more about my FREE Social Media Content Calendar Template here.