How to Define Your Target Market and Customer Persona

Once you’ve created your product vision, you’ll need to determine who you’re creating this product for.

For this, you’ll have to define your target market and then go a step further to define your customer persona(s). So what is the difference between the two?

Defining Your Target Market

Defining your target market will give you the segment of people you’re targeting, according to their age, location, education, industry, interests, gender and similar demographic information. Of course, you don’t have to note down all these details, only those that will be relevant for your product.

Although narrowing down your audience may sound counterintuitive at first, it’s actually a crucial step you can’t miss. The fact of the matter is that you can’t sell to everyone, and if your marketing scope is too wide, you’ll only be wasting your resources.

Marketing to everyone is like shooting darts in the dark - you will run out of darts probably before you even hit the dartboard once.

The second part is creating your customer persona.

Creating Your Customer Persona

A customer persona is the representation of your ideal customer - based on market analysis and data collected from your existing customers. Aside from demographics, a customer persona should give you information about your ideal customers such as their typical buying behavior, their lifestyle, their needs, their problems and challenges, goals and motivations.

Once you define your customer persona (or personas), it will help you further develop your strategy when it comes to the product itself but also marketing and sales. You’ll be able to know where to find your ideal customers, how to speak their language, create the features they need, deliver the content they’re interested in and even predict their common objections.

How to Create Customer Personas in Infinity

Of course, all the stakeholders should be able to see this information as it will influence so many decisions, which is why it belongs in your product management board. You can easily set it up in Infinity by using the Columns view, creating different columns for different personas. You’ll be able to add a description for each persona along with all the information you’ve collected, plus you can add images and gifs to help you visualize these people better.

Here’s how the customer persona template looks in Infinity.

You can easily create your customer persona(s) using this template like this:

• Step 1: Open Customer Personas subfolder in Product Strategy folder
• Step 2: Click on the item you want to change and a modal will appear
• Step 3: Edit the description with your information. First, write a brief description of your persona.
• Step 4: Add their goals. What does your ideal customer want to accomplish that your product can help them with? In the case of B2B, the ultimate goal will always be growing their business and increasing their revenue, but you should also add some goals specific to your product. And, if your business is B2C, the situation is a bit different. For example, if your product is a workout app, their goal can be losing weight or staying fit. 
• Step 5: Add their challenges. What problems and challenges is your ideal customer facing daily that your product could solve? For Infinity, a typical challenge is ‘the team needs to use several tools which causes confusion, delays and misunderstanding.’ Knowing their biggest challenges will help you build the best solution to those exact problems. 
• Step 6: Add their buying motivation. What motivates this person to buy your specific product? Out of all other similar products on the market, what would be their biggest motivation to buy precisely yours? For example: ‘They feel limited by the tools they are using currently.' Defining the buying motivation will help you determine how your product is different from others on the market and what its biggest values are. 
• Step 7: Add their buying concerns. What would be the main objection that could prevent this person from buying your product? Maybe the tools they’re currently using are free and yours isn’t, or they think that it would take too much effort to switch to your product if they’re already using something similar. By defining these concerns you’ll be able to prepare counterarguments and solutions that would remove the buying objections. 
• Step 8: Add similar products they use. This way you will get a better idea of how your product should outshine and replace them in the eye of your ideal customer. 
• Step 9: Add their industry in the Industry field.
• Step 10: Add their job in the Job field.
• Step 11: Remove the image from the template and add one that represents your customer persona. 
• Step 12: Repeat the process to add more customer personas.

Once you’ve defined your customer personas, this will be a strong foundation that will determine all your decisions. But, you should be ready to learn about your audience as you go and even adapt your target market and your customer personas if you see the need for it in the future.