Personas Template | Work customer-centric with TheyDo

Use these 5-step template to create perfect personas

There has been much debate about how to use personas, but there is one simple truth everyone can agree to: every customer is a unique individual, and not everyone needs the same thing. Personas are by far the most powerful tool you have to communicate what all your customers need.

Whether you are seeking to serve business buyers, millennial consumers, or government employees, use this mini-guide to create personas in 5 simple steps.

Define your ideal customer
Define why they use your product and how they get value from it
Define your most unsuccessful customer type
Create a 2×2 matrix
Fill in the matrix and make them visual

1. Define your ideal customer

What does he or she need? Why do they buy your product or service? By asking these fundamental questions, you’ll be able to create an ideal customer profile quickly and effectively. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but try to be as specific as you can.

Answer these questions if you are stuck:

What ‘job’ is your ideal customer trying to do, they are buying your product for?
When they have successfully used your product, our ideal customer feels …
If our ideal customer could describe their personality in one sentence it here’s what they’d say: …

2. Write down why and how they choose you

Start with why:

Why does your ideal customer choose you, over everybody else? Is there something in particular that you do exceptionally well, that others don’t? Another way to look at this is to know that the biggest ‘competition’ is not doing anything at all. So when your ideal customer does buy your product, why is it better than doing nothing at all?

Now write down how they get value:

How does your ideal customer get maximum value from your product once they buy it? This is focussing on the benefits of your product. Describe the value your customer gets from using your product exactly as you intended.

3. Define your most non-successful customer type

Repeat the exercise above, but this time for the total opposite customer type. Who do you not seek to serve? What drives these people and how does your product forgets to add value to them? Or, do they even have a job they need to do in the first place? If they’d accidentally buy your product or use your service, why wouldn’t they like it?

Staff pick: Browse free to use portraits from our friends at Unsplash.

4. Create a 2×2 matrix

Distill the essence of the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ statements you wrote down as your axis. ‘Why’ goes on the vertical axis, ‘How’ goes on the horizontal axis. This gives you a simple grid to define 4 personas. The top right quadrant is the ideal persona. They have a ‘high why’; they fully understand why it’s important to buy your product. They also have a ‘high how’; they know exactly how to get the maximum value of your product. Now you can go and fill in the other 3 quadrants.

5. Fill in the matrix and make it visual

Personas get remembered easier when they are presented visually. We recommend real photography because people simply remember faces best. Giving your personas a name will make it easy for people to connect and refer to them in any meeting, especially when you are not there. You will be amazed at what a name and a face can represent.

Ultimately, this persona template helps you to capture the Jobs your customer have to do. They define what gets measured using (big) data, and ultimately; personas will help you to relate to your customers and understand why they do what they do in any journey.