Terms like ‘target audience’ and ‘primary demographic’ can help to give you a rough idea of who your brand is for, but they also risk you developing an approach that’s ultimately too general. A marketing persona, on the other hand, is a fictitious representation of your ideal client - a specific person who you imagine marketing to and who your brand is designed for.
Why many marketing personas fail
This is a concept that might sound simple in theory, but too many fail because of that assumption. Your marketing persona can’t be too generic or based on outdated information, and finding the right information to base your persona on is equally important. There is a risk of your persona being both incorrect and also too vague, meaning that you might end up wasting time marketing to someone who doesn’t exist.
The foundation: Researching your audience
In addition to usual analytics and CRM tools, competitive analysis is a good place to start, allowing you to examine other businesses in your industry and identify any potential weaknesses in their marketing strategies. Furthermore, when getting information from your clients, you want to do so both quantitatively and qualitatively. Analytics, surveys and sales data can tell you the former while more in-depth interviews can provide the latter, as can client feedback forms and social listening.
Key components of a strong marketing persona
When crafting a marketing persona, you have to think of complications that might exist in a real client. Identifying pain points that exist when they normally interact with a service, or their buying objections can help you to adapt to them, establishing yourself as a more considered alternative in the market. Overcoming these challenges means understanding customer goals and behaviour patterns so that you can align yourself with them - if your marketing is B2B, then firmographics can help you to create a more accurate slice of who you’re targeting.
Step-by-step process for creating marketing personas that really work
- Define your purpose: Being clear with your objectives from the outset can help you to maintain a specific approach throughout this process, but an open-mind can help prevent you from being too rigid.
- Collect and analyse data: Use all of the tools at your disposal - surveys, feedback forms, interviews, analytic tools - casting a wide net can help you to draw from as much information as possible.
- Identify patterns and segments: Amidst all of this information, you can see patterns begin to emerge that define your marketing persona - helping you to understand what this ideal client both does and doesn’t want from your brand.
- Build detailed persona profiles: Using what you’ve learned, you can finally begin client profiling - either by using a template, AI or with specific client information that feels more true to who your audience is.
- Validate and update regularly: Your personas are always at risk of becoming outdated, but ensuring you repeatedly check if they still apply to your audiences can help your marketing to remain relevant.
Making personas actionable in your marketing
Now that you’ve got your personas, what do you do with them? You want to make sure that your marketing teams are actually using them in decision-making, and that means implementing them as a key part of the marketing process. If you’ve identified the kinds of brands that this persona would be most likely to choose, for instance, you can begin to see how your own marketing aligns with that of these other brands, informing your tone and approach.
Maintaining and evolving your personas
Your personas are, ultimately, a resource. Different from other documents of this kind, however, is that your personas should always be evolving in order to reflect the current state of your business and landscape. This means that persona management should become a part of your marketing loop, integrating new information to refresh them when signs start to show that they’re becoming obsolete - such as a decrease in response to your persona-modeled marketing.
Marketing personas are at once driven by analytics and robust business data, as well as being the most personal way you can market to audiences. If your business can understand what they’re looking for in a brand, as people, then you have effective marketing personas on your hand which can directly appeal to who your brand is for.
