Who is a marketing persona?

Today, we have a huge number of marketing tools and advertising platforms at our disposal. When we start the digital adventure, it seems to us that we should be everywhere because on every channel, there is our potential audience. But how do we do it, having, for example, a limited budget? Should we 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, what does he do, and what interests him? 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 we created representing a potential customer interested in our services and/or products. It consists of a detailed description of our customer’s behaviour and needs. Personas are most often created based on 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 does he have free time during the day? How can he spend it?)
• How does he travel?

Why create marketing personae?

Creating a marketing persona is key to understanding your audience group. Without this, there’s a pretty good risk that you’ll be targeting marketing efforts „blind,” which will result in burning 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 lets you 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 must collect and analyze demographic data such as age, gender, education, marital status, and place of residence.

With such detailed research, you can create a more precise marketing persona that reflects your customers’ actual needs and preferences. Remember to apply yourself to this step because incomplete or incorrect information will negatively affect our advertising efforts by reducing their effectiveness.

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 imagine our customer better. 

Step 3: Defining the details of the persona

Next, you need to define the details of the persona, such as age, gender, occupation, earnings, and place of residence. Definitely take a moment to 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 a 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 messages based on the information you’ve gathered about your target audience. By doing so, you can attract your customers’ attention 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 person’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 communication channels. 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 choosing 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 behaviour. 

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 our persona’s behaviour and daily life, we can reach them much more precisely with an advertising message. If our recipient is, for example, an office worker in a large corporation, we can 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 will likely not 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 waste marketing budgets on non-converting audiences!

Contact us, and let’s discuss together 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

It is essential to analyze the results both during and after the campaign to see if the persona you created was relevant and really fit the audience’s image. You can analyze data such as the number of clicks, conversions, sales, etc. It is also worth paying attention to user behaviour 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 introducing 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 to optimize 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 to 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 customer’s needs and preferences. Remember that if you are targeting different audiences, you will need to create personas 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 conducting thorough market and audience research is so important. Create a profile of your potential customer, ask questions, and look for answers to how your product or service can solve the recipient’s problems or improve and enrich their daily life. Also, remember not to look through your own prism. 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 analysis we make in this article is too detailed. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is a big mistake to rely on generalities regarding 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.

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 search for cheap airline tickets and are 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 and still looking for tickets from the same carriers. Still, 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 the 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 and 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.