How to create marketing personas and reach your audience more effectively
Who exactly are you marketing to anyway?
If you can't quite define your audience, you'll want to create marketing personas.
Marketing personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and involve demographic and psychometric data.
When building campaigns, posting across social or building and optimizing your website, you'll want to refer back to your marketing personas.
You want to know who you are marketing to so you can effectively speak their language, alleviate their pain points, create the kind of content they find valuable, and meet them on the digital channels they frequent.
Collecting information for marketing personas
Google Analytics is an excellent option for finding data tied to personas. Google Analytics provides demographic and psychometric data that can help shape your target market.
We can also look at the keywords people use to find us, what blog content is gaining traction, or what service pages your audience visits the most.
Speaking with customer care teams, conducting surveys, or speaking directly with clients is another option for gathering information.
Once you’ve created your quantitative and qualitative data, you’ll want to get started crafting your personas
Marketing persona worksheet & example
Marketing personas inform how you communicate with & reach your audience
The questions above are a great way to get a fuller understanding of who we are advertising to. They give us an outline of how our audience likes to consume information, their pain points, and what motivates their buying decisions.
It also allows us to get more focused when we start developing our campaigns.
For example, if we own an organic soap company that gives back to charities, and our persona is a high-income female interested in the outdoors and sustainability, we might select an interest in Patagonia and other sustainable brands as one of our targeting criteria.
Now that you understand your audience more, you can start thinking about how to best communicate what you do and why people should choose you. Answering this question may seem pretty straightforward, but it is one that organizations, no matter the size, have a hard time getting right.
If you are talking with someone in person, you are afforded a little more wiggle room to explain your business offering and benefits. When it comes to your website and corresponding campaigns, you have less time to get your point across, and it is vital to get this piece of messaging clear and concise. For a complete guide on communicating what you do, and nailing your value proposition, visit this article.
If you feel pretty confident about your messaging, and you’ve established your marketing personas, visit this article to learn the fundamentals of campaign planning.
