In this post we are going to go over how to create a customer persona for your niche.
In the last post you discovered how to find a profitable niche. We are now going to use this information to create your customer persona for that niche.
Remember, it is important that you know you can always edit and create new niches at any time. You can then re-do the exercise in this post to build out your customer persona for the new keyword/niche. We do recommend that when just starting out, stick to one niche. Work on this niche, refine it and build your business reputation within the niche. When you have one niche working for you, then you can look at adding another niche.
You have already done the hard work
Now you have your niche or a strong keyword that your business can solve a problem for, you now need to build a Detailed Customer Persona for this niche. Don’t worry, you have already done the hard work. The Niche you have settled on will make building your Persona with the tools we are going to show you super easy!
Let’s get started!
Carrying on the example I have been using throughout this series of the accounting software; I have a Niche of ‘Accounting Software For Start Up Businesses in South Africa’. Now comes the fun part.
What type of people would be interested in this?
In this example it would be people residing in South Africa who would call their profession solopreneurs and perhaps freelancers and also people interested in self employment. I could take this a little more in depth and perhaps target people who are Book Keepers and Accountants interested in Self Employment. These individuals would perhaps do private book keeping for small business clients. If I had a solution where they could use a ‘branded’ version of my accounting software for their clients, marketing to this segment with a targeted advert telling them they can have their own branded software to provide to their clients at no cost to them – the client pays – would definitely make sense.
Now let’s build your Customer Persona
So taking the idea that I would like to target book keepers and accountants interested in self employment; I now need to build a solid Customer Persona. Enter Facebook Audience Insights Click Here.
When it opens up, ensure you select Audience for all of Facebook – not just your page. On the left hand side you will notice an area where it states CREATE YOUR AUDIENCE.
Create Your Audience
I used the following Audience criteria for the example above: I made the location South Africa, I left the Age and Gender as the defaults, I added Self Employeed and Self-employment (I could have added soloprenueur) under Interests, I left everything else except under work I selected business and finance. I could have chosen an Accounting degree under Education if I wanted to be more specific to Accountants, but as I wanted to capture book keepers without a degree this search worked for me.
See screenshot below:
Now for the magic, based on the criteria I inserted, I was given the following information back:
Audience Age and Gender
The Age and Gender of the people in the audience I selected was as follows:
48% Women and 52% Men. 33% of the women are aged between 25-34 and 36% of the Men are the same age – that means that 69% of the audience I am looking for are aged 25-34 so that should be my target age group, I could also target 35-44 too, but to keep things simple in the beginning, I would focus on the 25-34 age group.
Relationship Status and Education Level
Then, I receive further information such as their Relationship Status and Education Level. Before you go to this step, make sure you amend your Create Audience Criteria to include your new age group selection to get more targeted results. You can simply click the Graph for the Audience you want and Facebook will automatically change it for you. As can be seen by the screenshot below most of my selected audience is married; But as it is under 50% this is not so important to note. But then getting to the Education Level, you notice that 67% of my audience has been to College since it is a high portion, I would gear my marketing material and focus towards these people. I would then refine my Create Audience Criteria to select people who have been to College and start the process again.
Job Title
Then you will see the Job Title of the people within Audience Criteria. 99% of the people I am looking for work in the Business and Finance Field – as this was one of my original criteria, this is not a surprise, however looking further down I notice that 50% of them are also within Management and 45% are Administrators. That means I could break my Customer Persona into two areas, one for people in Management and one for Administrators.
At the end of this I now have a lot of information about my target audience. You can now create quite a detailed Customer Persona. You should also experiment further. Add other interests, such as has dogs/cats, if they have children etc. By viewing the change in numbers you will discover a lot of information about your ideal audience.
Getting your Customer Persona(s) right and recording them correctly is essential. Get the workbook below to help you put into practice all you have learnt.