How to Create Customer Personas for Your Personality Quiz

It’s important to know who your customers are before you create a personality quiz. 

Why? Because you need to know who you are talking to.

Can you imagine trying to write a letter and not knowing who you were writing it for?

In order to feel confident writing content for your online business, you need to know who you are addressing on a deeper level than you may think.

You can start the process by creating customer personas.

Some marketers call this your ideal client profile or customer avatar, but we’ll call it a customer persona for the rest of this article.

So what is a customer persona? It is a fictional description of who your ideal customer is, backed by real data and market research from past and current customers.

By looking at who you have already worked with or who has purchased an offer from you, you’re able to see what similarities these people share. You can then use these similar traits and attributes to influence your customer persona.

Having a clearly defined customer persona will help you:

• foster empathy with your leads
• speak their same language
• create content that is specifically tailored to them
• segment your audience based on a number of factors (more on this in a future post!)

Without customer personas, you’ll have a difficult time crafting product and service offerings that act as a personalized solution for your audience.

Since the success of your business relies on how well it can sell a solution to your customer’s problems, you first need to deeply understand who that ideal customer is.

While you might want to jump straight into creating your quiz after you sign up for an Interact account, these next steps will help you create a quiz from a place of strategy and intention.

I love your enthusiasm, but let’s channel it into creating customer personas first.

You’ll see how much of a difference it makes when we write quiz results later in the article.

Exactly how to create customer personas for your personality quiz

Have you already tried to figure out what your quiz title or personality quiz results should be, only to stare at the blinking cursor and feel completely stumped on what to write next?

via GIPHY

May I suggest that it might not be “writer’s block” that’s throwing you off? Instead, it could be a good indication that you need to redefine who your target audience is, even if you feel like you already know who they are.

When you know the types of people you want to attract, you can better understand what they want from you. Since your business exists to serve your customers well, getting to know your audience on a deeper level is so important. (Psst… it will also come in handy when you write your own quiz.)

Start by understanding your audience demographics

When you are analyzing your audience, you’ll want to begin with the demographics. This term refers to a list of attributes that describe the person on a surface level.

By focusing on your audience demographics, you can grasp a broad understanding of who your brand is naturally attracting. It will help you classify your audience into broader segments before you dig into how they’re uniquely wired.

Demographics can include:

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Education level
• Income range
• Location

How do you gather all of this data? Luckily, there are a few tools that can provide your current audience demographic data, no calculations required.

If you’re active on social media and it’s a good representation of your audience, you can look into your social media analytics dashboard. Each social media platform has a built-in set of analytics when you create a business page.

For example, you can look at the demographics of a Pinterest business page by clicking the “Analytics” tab in the top left corner and choosing the “Audience Insights” option. You’ll find statistics that are generated directly from your Pinterest profile inside the audience demographic comparisons.

You can do this for each social media platform you regularly participate on and compare the demographic data. Are you seeing the same trends? While the exact numbers may differ from platform to platform, it should give you a better idea of who you are naturally attracting with your content.

Another way to grab your audience demographic data is to look at your Google Analytics account. Some website builder tools will give you their own set of demographic data, but Google Analytics is more accurate and comprehensive.

Google Analytics provides a standard report that includes your audience’s age range, gender, and a high-level interests overview when you enable Demographics and Interests in your dashboard. To learn more about how to set this up, click here for an easy five-minute video tutorial or read the textual instructions.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to use a fictional example to show how a content creator could create their own customer personas. You can follow along and use the same customer persona templates for your business.

I’ve always loved to play pretend so let’s say I’m a blogger and online educator who wants to teach my audience how to create passive income with their own blog. This industry is known for being saturated so I’m hoping that by better understanding my audience, I can create a set of differentiators that helps me stand out from the crowd.

First things first, I need to record audience demographic data from my dashboards. I’ll then use the template below to create the first section of my customer persona.

DEMOGRAPHICS Your Customer at a Glance Age range: Gender: Occupation: Education level: Income range: Location:

And just like that, I’ve encountered my first problem. 

The more I dig into my audience demographics, the more I realize that I might not be able to narrow it down to only one persona. What should I do next?

The good news is you can have more than one customer persona for your business. Creating multiple customer personas will help you clearly define different segments of your audience without limiting your knowledge of who is most attracted to your brand.

You may want to start with two or three customer personas so you don’t get lost in the weeds. Depending on the size of your audience or the variety of your offerings, you can adjust the number of customer personas, but this will give you a great start.

Keeping this in mind, I analyze at my audience demographics to look for similarities. After noticing a few trends, I’m ready to create three customer personas for my passive income education brand.

DEMOGRAPHICS Your Customer at a Glance Customer #1 Age range: 25-34 Gender: Female Occupation: Stay-at-home mom Education level: Some college Income range: Currently one-income family, $65-75k Location: Franklin, TN or similar suburb

DEMOGRAPHICS Your Customer at a Glance Customer #2 Age range: 25-34 Gender: Female Occupation: Young professional in creative, fast-paced career Education level: Bachelor’s degree Income range: $45-55k Location: Chicago, IL or similar city

DEMOGRAPHICS Your Customer at a Glance Customer #3 Age range: 45-54+ Gender: Female Occupation: Nearing retirement, want to pursue a second career Education level: Bachelor’s degree Income range: $80-90k Location: Mid-sized town of 20-30k people

Once I have these demographics all ironed out, I’m ready for my favorite part of the whole customer persona process: understanding my audience psychographics.

Go deeper into your audience psychographics

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that if you chat with just about anyone on the Interact team (including myself), we’ll probably steer the conversation toward psychology at some point.

We can’t help it! We love examining and studying the reasoning behind why people make certain purchasing decisions.

Customer psychology plays a massively important role in your marketing strategy, and thus, in your customer persona creation. When you uncover the deeper motivations behind every customer purchase, you can create targeted content that appeals to your audience’s needs.

Too many business owners define their demographics but disregard the psychographics. Sometimes it’s because they believe they know enough about their audience. Other times it comes from an insatiable need to start hustling with the little they know.

It’s not enough to know what decisions your customers are making.

You need to know why they are making them in order to improve your conversions and drive more leads.

In the last section, we focused on attributes like a person’s age, gender, and location. As you can imagine, we are just skimming the surface.

Even with the three customer persona examples I shared, it would take so much energy to try to attract every single person who fits that broad description.

Knowing that a person is 28 year old stay-at-home mom who lives in a suburban town doesn’t tell us much about who that person actually is. What drives them? What makes them want to get out of bed in the morning? These are the kind of questions we want to ask.

When you dig into the psychographics of your audience, know that it will take more time than it did to outline your demographics. But the higher investment of time often brings a higher understanding of your audience, not to mention a higher conversion rate when you get your marketing right.

The depth of this exercise will help you understand your audience on a whole new level. To begin, use these prompts as a jumping off point for your brainstorming session.

Goals and Motivations:  

• What do they want their life to look like in a year, three years, or five years?
• What are their main goals at the moment, and how do they set goals?
• What motivates them to reach beyond the status quo?
• What does their ideal day or ideal week look like?
• What do they value most in life or in business?
• What stage of business or life are they in now?
• What stage of business or life would they like to be in?
• What challenges them in a healthy or unhealthy way?
• What are their blind spots in terms of [Blank]?
• What are they interested in learning more about?
• Of the topics you cover, what do they care most about?
• What “magic pill” solution would they take advantage of if they could?
• What actual solution can you offer them?
• What motivates them to purchase from someone?

Personal Traits and Characteristics:

• How would their family and friends describe them?
• If you used three adjectives to describe their [Blank], what would they be? 
• What are their biggest strengths and weaknesses?
• What are some of their contradictory traits or quirks?
• What energizes them, and what drains their energy?
• What do they wish others knew about them?
• At the end of a long day, how do they feel?
• How would they define the word [Blank]?

Of course you don’t have to answer all of these questions for each customer persona but it might be helpful to cherry-pick a few to use. You can either do your own brainstorming at this stage or interview people in your audience who fit each persona (but more on that later).

Alright, back to the customer persona example we go.

With my three personas in mind, I’m already seeing how each person would answer these questions differently. The stay-at-home mom will surely have different goals than the nearly retired professional, although they may share common interests and want to learn about similar topics.

This is the beauty of doing the deep work of defining each persona’s psychographics.

I’m going to make this brief so I don’t keep you here all day, but feel free to go as in depth as you’d like with your own example.

PSYCHOGRAPHICSYour Customer at a Glance Customer #1 Goals: As a stay-at-home mom, she wants to add extra income to her household without going back to work on a full-time basis. To earn anywhere between $2,000-3,000+ each month in passive income while she’s spending quality time with her kids would be her ultimate dream. She would like to work up to 10 hours a week but is willing to increase that number in the beginning as she gets started. Motivations: With young kids at home, she wants to show them that she can pursue a career she’s proud of while staying home to care for them. She doesn’t care about making a big name for herself. She only wants enough visibility to help her create a balanced life and profitable blog. Her core values are family, community, education, freedom, and flexibility. Characteristics: Her friends know her as a deeply creative and introspective person they can trust and confide in. She frequently gets lost in the details but loves to stay organized. There’s a purpose and reason behind everything she does. She takes her work seriously but doesn’t take herself too seriously in the process. Her husband would describe her as disciplined, friendly, and driven. Struggles: She struggles to find a way to say yes to the projects she’s excited about while also balancing her responsibilities as a mom to young kids. She doesn’t want to waste time on passive income strategies that don’t work. She’s willing to invest in quality education if it means she can save time since it is her most prized (and rare) resource. She struggles to know where to begin, but once she has a roadmap, she knows exactly what steps to take to get there. Ultimately, she is in search of an in-depth, self-paced course she can complete on her own time.

Is it just me or did this customer persona totally come to life?

Do you see how much more we know about this persona now that I’ve clearly defined her goals, motivations, characteristics, and key struggles? You can do the same for each persona you create.

You’ll notice that it reads almost like a story as you create each section. This is done intentionally so that you feel more personally connected to your customer persona. (If you want to create even more of an ideal client story, you can find instructions on that activity here.)

As you read through my example, you might be wondering how to create the same thing for your own customer personas. Simply follow this template for each persona and fill-in-the-blanks with your information.

PSYCHOGRAPHICSYour Customer at a Glance Goals: As a [Blank], she/he wants to [Blank]. She/he wants to earn anywhere between [Blank] each month while learning about [Blank]. She/he would like to work [Blank] a week but is willing to [Blank] if [Blank]. Motivations: She/he wants to show people that [Blank] without sacrificing [Blank]. She doesn’t care about [Blank]. She/he wants to [Blank] so she/he can create a [Blank]. Her/his core values are [Blank], [Blank], and [Blank]. Characteristics: Her/his friends know her/him as a [Blank] person who they can [Blank]. She/he frequently [Blank] but loves to [Blank]. She/he has a tendency to [Blank] but always makes sure to [Blank]. Her/his [Blank] would describe her/him as [Blank], [Blank], and [Blank]. Struggles: She/he struggles to find a way to [Blank] while also balancing [Blank]. She/he doesn’t want to waste time on [Blank], so she/he is willing to invest in [Blank] if it means she/he can [Blank]. She/he struggles to know [Blank], but once she/he has [Blank], she/he knows exactly what to do when [Blank]. Ultimately, she/he is in search of [Blank] solution.

Not only have you peeled back the layers of each persona, but now you’re able to translate this information and apply it to a personality quiz.

It will basically write itself now that you have the psychographics in place, but before you create your quiz, I want to leave you with a few best practices to ensure your personas are as accurate and effective as possible.

Customer persona best practices to follow

As you work on the demographics and psychographics of your audience, keep these tips in mind when you create each customer persona. They’ll help you stay focused on what’s important and give you a cheat sheet to use when it comes time to create your persona-inspired quiz.

Be specific

You’ve probably heard the adage, “If you try to attract everyone, you’ll attract no one.” It’s widely spread in the marketing world because it’s true. Without specificity, your message will lack the clarity your audience needs to make a confident purchasing decision.

This is why I recommend going beyond the demographics when you create a customer persona for your quiz and overall marketing strategy. If you rely on demographics only, your customer personas will miss the human touch they need to be truly useful.

If you were a wedding florist and a couple wanted to book your floral design services, confirming their wedding location is nearby would be important, but that’s just the start.

You’d also want to know what budget range they set aside for the project, when their wedding date is, and what their wedding style is going to be. (Wild Fleurette created an awesome quiz to gather this exact data!)

Don’t be afraid to get specific!

Many content creators favor broad messaging because they are afraid to alienate a potential customer, but it’s too easy for your content to get lost in the crowd if it’s not specific enough. You’ll see your conversion rates rise when you select a target market.

Model your personas after real people

Remember how defining the psychographics helped us feel more personally connected to each persona? This is because the people we were describing no longer felt like lifeless avatars but rather dynamic examples of people who need our help.

As you write about the struggles and characteristics of people in your audience, there may be a few customers who immediately come to mind. This is a good thing! It means you are modeling your customer personas after real people.

Sure, your customer personas are a fictional representation of your audience, but the information needs to have a human touch. One of the ways to do this is to name each persona.

No, really. I mean it.

The examples I’ve used throughout this article have titled personas in the style of “Customer #1,” but that doesn’t inspire a personal connection. Instead, I should name the persona after someone in my audience it reminds me of or a name that feels like a fit.

The next time I write an email, social media post, or blog article, I can write it as if I’m talking to a human named Samantha or Angelica, not an impersonal “Customer #1” label.

This will also make it easier once you launch multiple offerings. Some products or services might be a better fit for certain customer personas than others so having real names attached will help you identify people in your audience who fit the descriptions and feel like a perfect fit.

To take it a step further, you could even add a free stock photo to each customer persona to make it feel real. Unsplash has a whole library you can choose from. You can also add a quote or saying that the persona resonates with or would say themselves like this persona example from Indie Game Girl.

The more real your customer personas feel, the more likely you’ll adopt them into every aspect of your marketing including your quiz.

Collect audience data with a survey

You know how to access your analytics, but what if you want more qualitative data? There is a story behind every statistic in your business, and a customer survey might be just what you need to reveal what that story is.

When you send a survey, you can ask:

• what their interests are
• what they liked or disliked about their customer experience
• what topics they want to learn more about
• why they started following you and continue to follow you
• what influences their purchasing decisions
• how interested they are in each of your core products or services
• any other information that feels relevant to create your quiz

For long-form surveys, you can look into tools like Typeform and SurveyMonkey to help you gather data and responses from your customers. Most content creators send surveys through a private email but you can choose to send them through sharing the link on social media as well. 

If you decide to send your survey to a larger subset of your audience, keep in mind that some people may not fit one of your customer personas.

The more someone fits your ideal client or customer description, the more relevant their survey response will be. If a person takes your survey and clearly isn’t in your target audience, simply remove their response from the database.

Talk to your customers directly

While surveys can be a great way to collect data and feedback from your ideal audience, it has some drawbacks worth noting.

One is that your audience may be faced with needing to choose from a series of multiple-choice answers that might not feel like a great fit. They may not have enough room on the survey to give you detailed feedback or the focused nature of the questions could feel limiting.

One of the best ways to get a better understanding of your target audience is to conduct interviews with people who are already audience members and customers. If you want to attract more people like them, why not go directly to the source to see how you can do just that?

Customers will have more to share in terms of how effective your marketing and offerings are, but if you are in the beginning stages of launching your business, it can still be helpful to interview people who are following you on social media or have joined your email list.

No matter if you are interviewing customers or audience members, you’ll want to come prepared with a prewritten list of interview questions. You don’t have to ask your customers the same questions each time, but the questions in this infographic are a good start.

After you create a list of interview questions, you’ll want to decide what kind of interview you want to conduct. Here are the most common interview types for entrepreneurs.

Phone interview: One of the easiest ways to conduct an interview with your audience is through the phone. Some people are uncomfortable with being on video, so this may be a good option to set them at ease.

Over the phone, you can ask a prepared list of questions while also going with the flow to see where the conversation takes you. As you talk with each customer, take notes on what questions they are more likely to hesitate on and which answers come more naturally than others. You can also jot down their responses to each question in a spreadsheet to keep all of your notes in one central place. Keep repeating this same process for a few customers and audience members until you’ve confirmed your customer personas.

Video interview: When you interview someone by phone, you’re missing out on seeing their body language. Video interviews allow you to see how a person is communicating with their hands, face, and body in addition to the words they speak.

This can be a good fit for audience members who live in a different part of the world because you can skip long distance phone charges and travel fees. You can also ask to record the video interview so you can revisit it later if you need to. This is one of the most common ways to interview customers because of its ease of use, accessibility, and functionality.

In-person interview: If you want to get to know more about locals in your area who may be interested in your products or services, you could benefit by meeting with them personally for an in-person interview. This is a great idea if you have a few key people in mind that you would really like to get to know and who seem to fit one (or more) of your customer personas. 

You can schedule in-person interviews individually or schedule them all in one sitting at a single coffeeshop that is centrally located in your area. Since an in-person interview usually involves additional travel time on their part, you can treat them to coffee or write them a handwritten thank you note as a way to go above and beyond.

Focus groups: If one-on-one interviews feel too time-consuming at the moment or you feel like you’ll be asking a lot of the same questions, you could host a focus group locally in your area or even online through a video conferencing call.

In a market research focus group, you’ll gather five to seven people together who fit your customer personas and get their direct feedback on your offerings, marketing, messaging, and more.

People may be influenced to give feedback based on what the focus group says rather than their own opinions, but this format could help open new conversations that wouldn’t have happened one-on-one. 

From there, you can conduct an interview that fits your needs and helps you identify how accurate your customer personas are.

Revisit your customer personas at least twice a year

If there’s always one thing you can count on when you run an online business is that you’ll constantly be evolving. To make sure these changes don’t affect the effectiveness of your marketing, it’s a good idea to review your customer personas a couple times each year.

Any time you change your niche or shift your brand positioning, you’ll want to update your customer personas and examine if you are still trying to market your products to the same people.

The easiest way to do this is to put an automated reminder on your calendar so that you check in regularly with your customer personas. Another way is to review them each time you are about to launch a new offering.

By revisiting your personas, you’ll keep them top-of-mind as you create new messaging and evolve your brand with a high level of intentionality.

You’ll also want to regularly review your quiz once you create and publish it on your website, which I’ll show you how to do in just a second.

Your analytics dashboard inside Interact will show you the statistics you need to know along with a full breakdown of what quiz results your audience is receiving.

This is a great way to keep an eye on who is most attracted to your brand as it grows because each of your quiz results will be created from your customer personas. This is what we’ll talk about next as we turn your personas into engaging quiz results.

Using customer personas to write personality quiz results

You might be wondering why you are diving into how to create a quiz now instead of starting with a quiz in the beginning. It’s difficult to decide what your quiz results should be without fully understanding your audience and customer personas.

That’s why we lead with the personas. Your quiz results will come more naturally when you work backwards and understand how to separate your audience first.

Also, without clear customer personas, your personality descriptions could feel bland and lackluster. You want people to walk away feeling like you totally get them in a way others don’t, not give them a broad description that doesn’t fit them.

You only have a few moments to make a great impression after someone takes your quiz.

Let’s make sure the impression is memorable and positions you as an expert who knows your audience on a deep level.

As you write each quiz result, keep in mind that you’ll need:

• a title for every personality type (which can connect with your customer persona)
• visuals that bring the personality type to life on the page
• paragraph that quickly describes each personality type

Let’s start with the first step.

Deciding on a personality type title

The very first thing someone sees when they complete your quiz is the title you’ve given them. If the title is boring or irrelevant, people may not stick around to read the rest of your personality description no matter how hard you’ve worked on it.

Each title should include a descriptor that defines each personality type with an optional adjective to further differentiate your quiz from others.

Here are a few personality type title examples from real quizzes:

• The Caretaker from a brand psychology quiz
• The Independent from a relationship style quiz
• Minimum Viable Funnel Maven from a sales funnel copywriting quiz
• The Queen from a career type quiz
• The Educator from a brand voice quiz
• The Adventurer from a business coaching quiz
• Oprah from a brand persona quiz

You can take inspiration from your customer personas to create personality type titles that fit your audience. In my earlier example, the stay-at-home mom persona we have now titled “Samantha” instead of “Customer #1” could inspire many different quiz result titles.

Looking back at the list of psychographics, we can pull out the most defining characteristics of this persona. If I wanted to specifically give quiz results based on each persona’s life stage, I could title the result “Motivated Mama” so it fit the person’s personality and lifestyle.

If that didn’t feel like a fit, I could also pursue a quiz result title that spoke to her habits and collaboration style by calling her “The Organized Implementer.” Both titles fit the descriptions I wrote earlier, but they both are helping her uncover something different about herself.

A quiz result like “Motivated Mama” would help women who fit that persona find resources and solutions for creating passive income while juggling motherhood. “The Organized Implementer,” however, would help people with this result take action on strategies they can immediately implement to earn more passive income while they create an organized system for tracking their progress.

Depending on how I want to market my products and services, I can decide which feels like the best fit. Because I’m going to be focusing more on giving my audience goal-oriented activities, I might choose “ The Organized Implementer” as a title.

Here’s what the title will look like once it is inside Interact.

I can follow the same process for the other two customer personas. Once I have my quiz result titles set in stone, I can move on to choosing imagery for each result.

Add personality with imagery

Since we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it’s a no brainer to add a graphic or stock photo to each personality type. This will visually communicate what their quiz result is before they read more about it.

You can choose stock imagery to help your quiz results come to life. If you’d rather create branded graphics or your own lifestyle imagery, feel free to include that as well. You should be able to find stock imagery that fits your brand colors and style.

Interact has a built-in stock imagery search tool that makes it even easier to find photos for each of your quiz results. With my example in mind, I might try to search for a keyword like “organization.” The sample of stock imagery it gives me feels more corporate, which won’t be a fit for my casual audience.

I revisit the stock image library, only this time, I type in the word “organized” hoping that it will give me different results. Luckily, I’m able to find a colorful and feminine image that feels like a great fit for “The Organized Implementer” type.

I select the image in the bottom right as my highlighted image for this quiz result and crop it accordingly. Once I do that for each of the quiz results, I’ll be ready for the next step.

Personality description for each quiz result

This is where your customer personas will really come into play. Reviewing your psychographics, you’ll be able to pull details from what you’ve already written to create short personality descriptions that fit each audience type.

I recommend keeping your personality descriptions to three or four short sentences. This will give you enough room to specify what is unique about each quiz result without overwhelming your audience with information.

If you want to add more information to your personality descriptions, you can do so in a landing page (like this) or a follow-up email sequence.

I’ll be using the short descriptions for my example. I already know that “The Organized Implementer” is a type of my audience that loves to take decisive action, stay organized, and follow a to-do list. I can use some of these details in my descriptions to make them pop.

Here’s a template I’ll be working from that you can use for your own quiz results.

Title: [Blank] Description: As a [Blank], you’re known for being [Blank], [Blank], and sometimes a little [Blank]. You’re driven by [Blank] and value [Blank]. You are focused on accomplishing [Blank] so you can [Blank], but you’ve been struggling with [Blank] along the way. I’ll show you how to [Blank] so you can achieve [Blank] in no time – check your inbox for more details and a few goodies!

You can change the voice of this template to fit your own brand voice so everything stays consistent, but this gives you a good start. I’ll use the same template to create a description for my quiz result example.

Title: The Organized Implementer Description: As an Organized Implementer, you’re known for being disciplined, driven, and detail-oriented. You value spending quality time with your family, so any strategy you implement has to save you time. You are focused on creating passive income streams so you can spend more time away from the computer, but you’ve struggled to find a diversified business model that works for your blog. I’ll show you how to create a blog that’s intentionally set up to earn passive income so you can start working from a place of rest and purpose rather than hustle – check your inbox for more details and a few goodies!

Notice how many of the same details I used for the personality description are found in the psychographics section I put together earlier. I’ve already done so much of the work so why not use what I have to create something engaging for each quiz result?

I’m all about working smarter rather than harder.

When I’m ready, I can copy and paste each description into the corresponding quiz result pages within the Interact platform. After adding a simple call-to-action button that points to my free resources page, I’m finished!

All that’s left to do is create quiz questions and answers that will lead my audience to the quiz result that fits them best. Then I can publish my quiz and promote it on my blog, social media, website, and beyond.

To learn more about how to create the rest of your personality quiz elements, click here.

As I close this article, I challenge you to:

• create two or three customer personas based off of your audience data and feedback
• write quiz results based on the customer personas you’ve created
• launch and promote your quiz so you can gather more audience data

Think you can handle it? (I know you can.)