You’ve probably seen one-page customer personas that look tidy and sensible: job title, age, channels, pain points. Great. But most of them miss the single thing that actually makes a persona useful: why that person would want to choose your company over everyone else.
As I say in the video: “Why, why, why? Why should that particular group of people choose your business?”
If your customer persona can’t answer that, it’s not a decision-making tool, it’s decoration.
Start with the three essentials (and don’t skip psychographics)
A meaningful persona is built from three data areas: demographics, psychographics, and communication preferences.
Use the demographics to find them, psychographics to understand what drives them, and communication data to know how to reach them.
Psychographics – hopes, fears, ambitions, attitudes to risk – are where the “magic why” lives.
Your marketing messages should be designed to address those internal drivers (e.g. allay a fear or help achieve a goal).
If your Customer Persona only lists a job title and a problem, you won’t know why they’d actually act, so that means you can’t really communicate effectively with them.
How to dig out somebody’s real why – six practical steps
- Interview actual customers and prospects. Ask about their day, what keeps them up at night, who signs off on choosing a company like yours, and what a perfect solution looks like.
- Use the Whys. Keep asking “why” until you get to the root motivation or trigger to buy.
- Map jobs → pain → desired outcome. Link what they need to get done to the emotional reason they’ll actually choose you, to the outcome that choosing you will have on their business.
- Test marketing messages quickly. Run small experiments (emails, social posts, landing pages) that speak to the hypothesised “why” and measure their response.
- Capture objections and decision criteria. What would stop them choosing you? Who else would they consider? Make sure you openly address these in your marketing, showing them all the reasons why you can counter their objections.
- Turn the insight into one clear sentence: “They choose us because we help them [tangible outcome] so they can feel [emotional outcome].”
One-page persona: what to include (make the why front and centre)
- Customer Persona name & role
- Key demographics that let you find them
- The Magic Why: one short sentence that explains why they’d choose you
- Their top 3 goals and top 3 frustrations
- Their Buying triggers & timing
- Who’s in their Decision-making unit
- Preferred channels & times to communicate
- Key messages that speak to their hopes, fears, ambitions, values.
Use more than one customer persona
Your business will almost certainly have multiple customer groups. Build a persona for each significant segment so that your marketing messaging and tactics (how you reach and engage them) can be tailored, not generic.
Key takeaways
- If your persona doesn’t explain why someone would choose you, it’s not useful.
- Psychographics are where marketing hooks live. Dig into hopes, fears and triggers.
- Test your “magic why” quickly and measure if you’ve really found it. If it doesn’t move your key marketing metrics (responses, leads, conversions), refine it.
- Keep the persona to one page and build one for each distinct customer group.
Read this article to find out how to create a Customer Persona.
Who am I and why do I share?
Hello, I’m Kara Stanford, a successful Strategic Marketing Consultant, Mentor and Trainer with over 25 years of experience. I want YOU to succeed, using marketing to fuel that success.
Too many amazing small businesses fail to achieve their potential because they haven't got their marketing right. I'm here to change that!
I blend years of marketing experience working with medium to small businesses AND sound marketing knowledge, learnt from the best in the world.
I then share my knowledge and wisdom so YOU know what marketing to do, when and why to make your small business the raging success it should be.
