Be honest; what do you know about your customers? More specifically, what are their likes and dislikes, motivations and frustrations. If you're honest, the answer may be "not as much as we'd like to". Never fear, this is where customer personas come in, and today, we're going to give you an introduction to customer personas and their importance to your business and website.
<h2>What Is A Customer Persona?</h2>
A customer persona is a fictional character representing your ideal customer along with characteristics, likes, dislikes and more. The information used to create customer personas should come from your personal research, analysis of real customers and analytics provided via multiple sources such as Google and Facebook.

The more detailed your customer persona, the more value it will have to your business or brand. <b>How Can Customer Personas Help Your Business?</b>

Customer personas provide insight into your ideal customer base, allowing you to make informed decisions based on real-world data. These personas will enable you to increase customer experience and, ultimately, your sales. You can use the information in your customer personas across all areas and aspects of your business, including your website.
<h2>How To Create A Customer Persona</h2>
While a customer persona can include all sorts of information and data, we recommend concentrating on three key areas when creating your first personas.

<b>Demographic information</b>
<ul>
 	<li>age, gender, income, education, occupation</li>
</ul>
<b>Geographic Information</b>
<ul>
 	<li>location, country, county, town</li>
</ul>
<b>Psychographic Information</b>
<ul>
 	<li>personality, interests, behaviours, lifestyle, values</li>
</ul>
You should gather the information used to create your customer personas from first-hand experiences such as polling your customers, conducting research and focus groups, as well as secondary information from places such as Google Analytics and Facebook. Remember, the more real-world data you use, the better your personas will turn out to be.

It can also help add a representative picture of your customer persona, which usually helps to bring the persona to life.
<h2>Customer Personas For Web Design</h2>
If using customer personas to influence your new website's design and development, it can be helpful to include additional information you may not have thought about when you initially created them. This information should include:
<ul>
 	<li>Their level of tech-savviness.</li>
 	<li>Their knowledge of the web.</li>
 	<li>Their openness to change.</li>
</ul>
These three critical pieces of information have the power to impact your new website significantly. <b>How Many Personas Should You Have?</b>

It's easy to get carried away when you start the journey of creating customer personas, but in an ideal world, you should try and limit the number of customer persons to around 4-6. The reason for creating customer personas is so you can tailor your business to the needs of your ideal customers; very rarely will you have more than 4-6 ideal customer types.
<h2>Pulling It All Together</h2>
The world of website design and development can be hit or miss; with an array of companies competing for your business, it can be hard to sort the good from the bad. If, however, you look for an agency that can give you reasons behind their decisions based on real-world data such as customer personas, then you should be on your way to success.

The team at Actuate Digital are happy to help you develop customer personas to support your business efforts and are even available to perform research such as hosting focus groups. Our goal is a lasting partnership with you and your company, fuelled by a successful customer-centric website.

If you'd like to hear more or get together to see what Actuate can do for your business, please contact us today.