Who is a marketing persona?

Today we have a huge number of marketing tools at our disposal, as well as advertising platforms. When we start the adventure of digital, it seems to us that we should be everywhere, because on every channel there are our potential audience. Just how to do it, having, for example, a limited budget? Choose Google Ads or Facebook Ads? How about LinkedIn? Do our audiences use Google’s browser, or perhaps Microsoft Bing?  

How do we know where our potential customer is? Who is he even, what does he do, what is he interested in? We will get the answers to these and many other questions when we create a persona that reflects our audience.

What is a marketing persona?

A marketing persona is a fictional character created by us that represents a potential customer interested in our services and/or products. It consists of a detailed description of our customers’ behavior and needs. Personas are most often created on the basis of market and audience research, answering various questions that allow us to determine the characteristics of your audience. 

• Who is our recipient? (e.g. first name, last name, age, occupation, background, social roles)
• What can he do and what are his interests?”
• What problems does he have, what hinders his daily life, what needs does he have?
• What does our recipient’s typical day look like? (What mode of transportation does he use to travel to school or work, when during the day does he have free time, how can he spend it, etc.)
• How does he travel?

Why create marketing personae?

Creating a marketing persona is key, first and foremost, to understanding your audience group. Without this, there’s a pretty good risk that you’ll be targeting marketing efforts “blind,” and this will result in burning through your budget on audiences that don’t necessarily belong to your target audience. With marketing personas, companies can better understand their customers and tailor their marketing strategy to their needs and preferences. Defining a persona also allows you to personalize your content and choose the right channels to communicate with your customers. 

How to create a marketing persona? 

Step 1: Research your market and audience

The first step in creating a marketing persona is market and audience research. At this stage, we should conduct a detailed analysis on the target audience of our product or service. If we want to conduct research at this stage, we will need to collect and analyze demographic data such as age, gender, education, marital status, place of residence.

With such detailed research, you can create a more precise marketing persona that reflects the actual needs and preferences of your customers. Remember to apply yourself to this step, because if we have incomplete or incorrect information, it will reflect on our advertising efforts in a negative way by reducing the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

Step 2: Create a fictional character

After gathering information about your audience, you can move on to creating a fictional character to represent your target audience. This character should be as realistic as possible and based on real data. It’s also a pretty cool practice to give our character a name and choose a corresponding photo – this way we’ll be able to better imagine our customer. 

Step 3: Defining the details of the persona

Next you need to define the details of the persona, such as age, gender, occupation, earnings, place of residence. Definitely take a moment and also analyze the interests, lifestyle, shopping preferences and typical day of our persona. The more detailed the description, the easier it will be to match it with a marketing strategy and the better we will understand our audience’s point of view. 

How to use marketing personae in an advertising campaign?

Personalize content – tailor content and message to marketing persona

If you’ve nailed the previous steps (and you should, it’s all about your business after all! :)), you can now create personalized content and advertising message based on the information you’ve gathered about your target audience. By doing so, you can attract the attention of your customers and get them interested in your offer, and that’s a big first step to success!

What sample questions can you use when personalizing content for your personas?

• How can your product or service solve a persona’s problem?
• What products or services have solved these problems so far?
• What are the other options for this product or service?
• How much does your product or service cost and can your prospect find it cheaper?
• How can a prospect buy your product or order your service?

And much, much more 🙂 

Choose the right communication channels

Creating a marketing persona allows you to accurately determine your target audience’s preferred channels of communication. Based on this, you can choose the best channels to reach your customers and deliver a personalized advertising message. It is worth remembering that different target groups use different communication channels, so it is necessary to think carefully about the choice of channels. You can also additionally analyze the so-called touchpoints, that is, the points of contact between information about our product, our brand or our company, and consumer behavior. 

What could be such sample touchpoints?

• online advertisements,
• website,
• profiles on social media,
• blog posts,
• guest posts,
• newsletters,
• presentations of products, etc. 

Time and place to reach the audience

By analyzing the behavior and daily life of our persona, we are able to reach them much more precisely with an advertising message. If our recipient is, for example, an office worker in a large corporation, we will be able to conclude from our research that our persona is in business meetings in the afternoons. We will not target ads to her at that time, since she is very likely not to see them anyway. Instead, it’s worth taking advantage of lunch, dinner or afternoon breaks if we know she spends them relaxing on the couch at home.

Create your personas and don’t burn through marketing budgets on non-converting audiences!

Contact us and let’s discuss together about the marketing persona suitable for your business. Let us help you effectively reach your target customer base, increase engagement and achieve better results!

Let’s talk!

Effectiveness of marketing persona

Analysis of activities

Both during and after the campaign, it is essential to analyze the results to see if the persona you created was relevant and really fit the image of the audience. You can analyze such data as the number of clicks, conversions, sales, etc. It is also worth paying attention to user behavior on your website, social media and other communication channels you have chosen for your strategy. 

It is also important to compare sales results before and after the introduction of your marketing persona. This allows you to determine how much the strategies tailored to your persona have affected your sales results, and what you need to pay attention to in terms of what you can optimize in your future marketing efforts.

The following is a good way to determine how much your persona has affected your sales results.

Improve your marketing strategy

The preceding point will give you room for improvement and show you exactly what else you can improve before you start the next steps. Based on the analysis of campaign results, you can improve your marketing strategy and adapt it to your customers’ needs and preferences. Remember that if you are targeting different audiences, it will be necessary to create a persona for each of these groups and then optimize each of them. 

Frequent mistakes when creating a marketing persona

Failing to understand the audience

The most common mistake in creating a marketing persona is not understanding the needs and preferences of customers. That’s why it’s so important to conduct thorough market and audience research. Create a profile of your potential customer, ask questions and look for answers on how your product or service can solve the recipient’s problems or improve and enrich their daily life. Also remember not to look through the prism of yourself. Just because you don’t like a product’s bright yellow packaging doesn’t mean it won’t appeal to the persona you’ve created.  

Excessive generality

At first blush, it might seem that the kind of analysis we make in this article is all too detailed. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is a big mistake to rely on generalities when it comes to your marketing persona. Far worse results may come from campaigns that you target a general student audience than from campaigns personalized for medical or law students. Still a different message will be for full-time students who live in a large city, and another for part-time students who commute to the university on weekends by train or car, for example. In contrast, you will prepare yet another strategy for students studying remotely. Each of these groups has different needs and different problems you can solve. The more detailed the description of the persona, the easier it will be to tailor your marketing strategy to it.

Lack of persona updates

If you are at least a little surrounded by technological innovations or work, for example, in the marketing industry, I suppose I don’t need to tell you how dynamically and quickly the world around us and, consequently, society are changing. Over the past few years (and even months), even your priorities and life situation have probably changed. For example, as a student you searched for cheap airline tickets and were satisfied with even one-day trips. It was important to see a piece of the world cheaply. Now that you have a steady job, price may no longer play as much of a role as it once did, and instead you prefer to go on a more leisurely trip of several days. You’re still interested in traveling, still looking for tickets from the same carriers, but instead of the cheapest one-day deals, you’re more likely to choose slightly more expensive, but more attractive destinations. Thousands of such examples can be given, but the most important thing for you to remember is that marketing persona should be updated with changes in the market and customer preferences. Failure to update your persona can lead to an ineffective strategy and advertising campaign, as well as budget burnout.

A few words at the end

Creating a marketing persona should always be one of the first points when creating a marketing strategy. With personas, companies can better understand their customers and tailor their strategy to their needs and preferences. It’s important to conduct thorough market and audience research and update the persona as the market changes, so take the time to do so. Remember that you can also always ask a marketing agency to prepare a strategy targeting your persona.