01Talk to five recent customers first
Pick five people who bought from you in the last few months. Include at least one who hesitated and, if you can, one who did not come back. Ask for fifteen minutes by phone or after a job, and say you are trying to explain the business better, not sell anything. The questions matter more than the number. Ask what was going on the week before they contacted you, who else they looked at, what almost sent them elsewhere, and how they decided. Then stop talking. With five employees you have a shortcut: each person already answers customers every day, so ask your team which question they hear most and which objection comes up before a no. Write the answers down in the customer's own words. Five conversations prove nothing statistically, and we are not claiming they do. They show you patterns in your own customers, which is what a persona is for.
- Ask: what was happening the week before you contacted us?
- Ask: who else did you look at, and why did you pick us?
- Ask: what almost stopped you?
- Ask: how would you describe us to a friend?
- Ask your team which question they answer most often
02Read what customers already wrote
You already hold a free archive of customer language. Google reviews, Instagram and Facebook messages, emails, contact-form entries and your team's notes after a call all contain the phrases people use for your service, and they are often not the ones on your website. Copy the lines that repeat into one document, with names and phone numbers removed. If you have a site, Google's Search Console help page says the Performance report groups your data by the queries people typed, with clicks and impressions, so you can see how people phrase the search that reaches you. The same page notes that a query can appear in your list even if you do not see your site when you run that search yourself, because results vary by time, place, device and search history. Treat the list as vocabulary, not as a count of customers. Our post on Search Console and Analytics explains the two tools, and our post on getting more Google reviews covers how to ask for the reviews you will be reading.
- Reviews: the reason they chose you and their word for the job
- Messages and emails: the question they asked before booking
- Contact form and call notes: what they needed and how fast
- Search Console queries: how they phrase the search (vocabulary only)
03Write one page per customer type
Group what you heard into two or three customer types, not ten. Name each one by situation, not by a stock name and a stock photo: 'the owner with a broken boiler on a Friday evening' tells you more than 'Maria, 34'. One page each, with the same fields. Skip age and income unless they change a decision you make. The test for every line is whether it can change something you write, charge or post. If the persona does not change a sentence on your homepage, a reply you send or a topic you cover, it is decoration, and you can delete it.
- Situation: what happened right before they looked for you
- Alternatives: who else they considered, including doing nothing
- Objection: what almost stopped them
- Decider: the one thing that tipped the choice
- Their words: three phrases, exactly as they said them
- Where they looked: Google, Instagram, a recommendation, a neighbour
04Put it to work, then check it
Use the page in three places. Open the homepage and the service pages with the situation and the words from the page, not with your company history; our post on writing your own website text shows how to start from what you say on the phone. Answer the objection in plain text next to the price or the booking button. Write each blog or social post as the answer to one question that a person in that situation asked. Then check it against reality: for the next ten enquiries, note which type each one was and whether the page predicted it. Rewrite what was wrong. Revisit it every quarter, or when you add a service. Before any of this, be able to say in one sentence what you sell, at what price and to whom; our post on DIY marketing or an agency explains why. If someone else runs your marketing, the persona is what you both review against, and our post on the monthly strategy call shows what that review looks like.
- Homepage opening line uses the customer's situation and words
- The objection is answered in plain text next to the price or booking button
- Each post answers one question from one customer type
- Check the page against the next ten enquiries, then revise every quarter
05Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
A persona is mostly work only you can do, because you hold the customers and the conversations. PROOF48 cannot interview your clients for you, and it cannot invent a persona for a business that has no customers yet. If you have none, talk to the people you hope to serve first and treat the page as a guess you are testing. The plans at /plans do not list a persona document as a line item. GROWTH, at 1,497 EUR a month with ad spend billed separately, includes audience research and retargeting for ad accounts, and our marketing page describes a process that starts with a brief on what you sell and who buys it. That page also says more content does not fix an unclear offer, and that we have turned down marketing engagements where the business was not ready. If your offer or price is still undecided, settle the persona and the offer before you pay anyone to produce content.
- We cannot interview your customers or invent ones you do not have
- No plan lists a persona document; GROWTH includes audience research for ads
- Offer or price still undecided: settle that before buying content
A salon site organised around services and neighbourhood
SCP Shine & Style, a beauty salon on Strada Baba Novac in Sector 3, Bucharest, was rebuilt by PROOF48 with a page per service, each with its own copy and media, and a landmarks line on every page for local searches around Dristor and Titan. A page per service and a line of place names are decisions a customer profile helps with: which services people ask about separately, and where they come from. We are not saying a persona exercise produced them, and we publish no booking or revenue figure for the salon, because we do not measure them and will not estimate them.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
What is a customer persona?
A one-page description of a type of customer, built from real customers: their situation, what almost stopped them, what decided it and the words they use. It is a working note for what you write and offer, not a statistic.
How many personas does a five-person business need?
Two or three, separated by situation. Past that, nobody on the team uses them. We have no measured figure for the right number; this is working advice.
Do I need paid research or a tool?
No. Conversations with your own customers, your reviews and messages, and Search Console for vocabulary are enough to write the first page. Paid research is a separate decision you can make later.
Can an AI tool write the persona for me?
It can tidy your notes into the one-page format. It cannot supply what your customers said, so a persona written without your conversations and messages is a guess with good formatting.
Where PROOF48 fits
A useful customer persona for a small business is one page per customer type, built from five conversations plus the reviews and messages you already hold, and kept only if it changes what you write, charge or post. PROOF48 cannot interview your clients for you. Its marketing process starts with a brief on what you sell and who buys it, and it says so when a business is not ready.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.