How to Build an Effective Marketing Persona
When creating a marketing strategy, one of the first steps that you need to address is defining the type of customers that you want to appeal to. To do this, good marketers build marketing personas, which are depictions of their ideal customer. This persona should be based on research, interviews, and experience with past customers. It’s an attempt to get into the mind of your target customer and understand their wants, needs, and pain points.
Once you build a great marketing persona, you can tailor your messages and marketing strategy so that you’re speaking to your target customers and create a unique connection with them so that when they’re ready to buy your solution, your company is the one they’ll look to.
What a finished marketing persona looks like:
As you can see, a complete buyer’s persona takes into account their demographics, behaviors, background, goals, challenges, what they would say and how they would say, pain points, and most importantly, how we can help them with their pain points. Getting this information is a time consuming, but very important task, because understanding who we’re speaking to allows us to effectively convey messages to them that are very useful and relevant to their lives. Few marketing endeavors are more wasteful than spending time and money for attention of an audience that isn’t relevant to your company.
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To create an effective marketing persona, you can either create your own document or use a template from another company. Personally, I used Hubspot’s free buyer’s persona template to create mine. There are plenty of resources and creating a marketing persona is relatively simple, so don’t get too caught up in the how it looks visually.
The most important part of creating your persona is the research that you do in getting the information that you need to fill out a detailed marketing persona. Conduct interviews with current/past customers, use resources as offerings in exchange for information from leads, and look at data/studies that have been done on your target customer so that you can better define and understand them. This should also be an ongoing process. Whenever you collect new information that helps you to have a better understanding of your customers, update your marketing persona. This allows you to be adaptive to cultural, technological, and economic changes and keep your messages relevant to your customers.
Next, you’ll start filling out your profile. Giving your persona a name and picture will help you picture your persona easier when creating marketing strategy and content. Start with basic details like background and demographics and progressively fill out the profile with higher levels of information like goals/aspirations/how you can help them. See below for an example marketing persona:
Now that you’ve got your detailed marketing persona, you can formulate an effective marketing strategy for your business! Knowing who you’re trying to sell to allows your business to personalize messaging and content to best engage your audience. From here, you can create a detailed marketing and content plan, then implement the plan and analyze its performance. Depending on how well your campaign does, you may need to make adjustments to your persona to help adapt your messaging and make it more effective.
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