The keyword in marketing is customisation, whether it is B2C or B2B sector. How to personalise our marketing activities if we don’t know our audience? Understanding your audience is beyond a necessity—it’s an art. You may think I’m exaggerating. Read this article to the end, and you’ll realise I’m telling the truth with my two secrets. The pivot of this art of understanding your audience is called “Persona”. Personas are fictional yet data-driven representations of your ideal customers. This article aims to unravel the intricacies of creating effective personas, offering any marketer a strategic edge in their marketing endeavours.
Understanding Personas
A persona is more than a simple customer profile; it’s a vibrant character sketch that embodies the needs, goals, and behavioural patterns of your target audience. An ideal persona portrait includes also elements of the lifestyle, network, and preferred communication channel(s) (Email, social media, phone) together with the preferred tone of voice (factual, friendly, containing emojis or not, etc.).
For decision-makers, such comprehensive personas are the compass guiding their marketing strategies, ensuring that every campaign resonates with the intended audience.
👓 Examples 👓
Step 1 – The Process of Creating Personas
Creating a persona begins with gathering data—demographic, psychographic, regional, and behavioural. This data can be sourced from:
- market research: some big names offer reports and studies about customer needs in whatever industries, per region, segment, etc. (In IT, Gartner, IDC, Datamonitor, etc.) You can also run your market research or turn to an external resource. In any case, it takes time, and if the resource is an expert, better to have a good budget. A cheaper option can be to turn to a marketing student, who will make a study for you but useful for him too.
- customer surveys are very helpful to refine or segment your targeted audience as well as deep-dive into your customers’ needs. Many (free) platforms enable the creation of structured questionnaires and run surveys. SurveyMonkey, Typeform are the ones I know in particular, but there are more.
- analytics tools: such as Google Analytics are a rich source of information to learn what information your targeted audience is looking for and how. (Example). If you use a CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.), you have at your disposal a valuable tool to build your personas as explained on this page.
Then starts an analytical job to identify patterns and commonalities within this data, shaping them into a coherent character.
👉🏻To make your persona realistic, give your character a name, a face, and a story that makes them relatable. The more precise you are, the more effective your marketing campaigns will be.
A comprehensive Toolkit from HubSpot
STEP 2 – Best Practices in Persona Development
Accuracy and relevance are the pillars of effective persona development. 6 Best-Practices:
- Avoid stereotypes and base your personas on real data.
- Regularly update your personas to reflect changes in the market & customer behaviour. Remember, a good persona is a living part of your marketing strategy, evolving as your audience does.
- How many personas should you create? Ideally, you must have 5 personas according to their decision-making level (influencer, buyer, enabler).
- Involve the sales team in building your personas. The sales guys know their clients, the market. They can bring very good practical information.
- Develop a negative persona. What is it? It is the client that doesn’t need your services or product. It helps to strip down the grey zones of some targeted clients.
- Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to get a complete portrait of your personas.
Leveraging Personas for Strategic Marketing
Personas can transform your marketing strategy. They allow for tailor-made campaigns, and messages that hit home. Use personas to predict customer needs, tailor your communication to their preferred touch-points, and even guide product development. They are not just tools for marketing but beacons for overall business strategy.
However, the first value of the personas is to support the customers’ segmentation. Second value is to enable refining or adjusting the value proposition and messaging, including the messaging architecture. Last but not least, it helps to develop the right content for the right client at each step of the customer journey.
Concrete Case in
Cyber Security
In my journey as a marketing professional, personas have been instrumental in crafting successful campaigns. For instance, a persona developed for a cybersecurity firm led to a 30% increase in engagement by targeting content specifically designed for that persona. This tangible success stands as a testament to the power of well-crafted personas.
ozngo Expertise in creating Personas
In my journey as a marketing professional, personas have been instrumental in crafting successful campaigns. Let me share two secrets.
A Day in Personas’ Life Approach
In my practice, I’ve heavily used the method called the ‘Day in the Life’. This method involves meticulously mapping out a typical day in the life of my persona, from morning until night. At each moment, I identify their pain points, emotional state, actions, and potential opportunities for intervention. This not only deepens my understanding of the persona but also pinpoints precise moments for impactful engagement.
For instance, consider a persona in the role of a CMO. I start by exploring their morning routine – perhaps they begin their day sifting through emails, feeling overwhelmed by the volume of tasks. Here, the pain point is clear: information overload and time management. The action they take might be to prioritize emails, but the underlying need is for efficiency and clarity. This is where I identify a touchpoint – offering a solution that simplifies their decision-making process right at the start of their day.
As the day progresses, I continue this analysis, identifying moments of stress, decision-making, and opportunity. By the end of the day, I have a comprehensive picture of the persona’s daily journey, complete with emotional highs and lows, challenges, and actions. This approach not only helps in creating highly targeted marketing strategies but also ensures that the solutions offered are timely, relevant, and deeply resonant with the persona’s daily life and challenges.
This ‘Day in the Life’ framework has been instrumental in crafting strategies that are not just effective but also empathetic. It allows me to connect with the persona on a human level, understanding their needs and desires in a way that goes beyond mere demographics or surface-level behaviour.
The Novelist’s Touch
My approach to persona creation transcends traditional boundaries, blending marketing acumen with the artistry of a novelist (I just finished my first novel about to be published). When crafting personas, I delve deep into character development techniques used by novelists, breathing life into each persona as if they were a character in a story. This method involves not just outlining demographic details, but also sculpting intricate backstories, motivations, aspirations, and even internal conflicts.
This narrative approach allows me to step into the shoes of my prospects, viewing the world through their eyes. It’s not just about knowing what they need, but understanding why they need it, how they feel about it, and what drives their decisions. For instance, in developing a persona for a tech startup, I imagined a character with a rich backstory, including their educational background, childhood, family constellation, career aspirations, and personal challenges. This depth enabled me to create marketing strategies that resonated on a more personal and emotional level, leading to a significant increase in customer engagement and loyalty.
By marrying the precision of marketing with the empathy of novel writing, I offer a unique perspective that not only captivates the audience but also fosters a deeper understanding of their needs and desires. This approach has consistently proven effective, yielding strategies that are as engaging as they are insightful.
Convinced, creating personas is an art? 😉
Conclusion
Personas are more than just a marketing tool; they are the essence of a customer-centric strategy. By understanding and implementing the art of persona creation, CMOs and CEOs can unlock new levels of engagement and success in their marketing efforts.
How have personas shaped your marketing strategies?
👉🏻Share your experiences
👉🏻or reach out for a deeper discussion on leveraging personas for business success.
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