In order to develop relevant content in social postings, marketing messages, and web pages, you must know your audience.
Introduction
When you’re trying to buy the ideal gift for someone, you visualize them and think of their needs while you are shopping or planning to shop. You run through a mental list of needs, wants, hates, loves, interests, and perhaps ambivalence. Building personas is the same exercise, just on a commercial level.
Defining personas, or profiling and documenting the needs, wants, desires, and other attributes of each type of person who buys from (or interacts with) your company is a process that will help you to:
- Write relevant copy that is both engaging and useful to each member of your audience.
- Segment your lists so that messages to the list are more targeted.
- Develop triggered marketing campaigns that will nurture leads and convert them to customers.
- Create web pages that answer actual questions and address tangible pain points.
Personas
Although often referred to as buyer personas, personas may represent other groups as well, such as the press, analysts, and investors. What’s more, defining personas is not a marketing function, nor are the personas used strictly for marketing. Profiling your customers or visitors is a company function and input from the sales department, customer support team, and other customer-facing groups will heighten understanding that will benefit the entire organization.
You can be as general or specific as you choose when drawing personas, but keep in mind that the more specificity you provide, the more targeted your messaging (or web-page content) can be. Definitions can be tracked in a simple spreadsheet or database application.
As valuable as this exercise is, it’s one thing to be empathetic to your customers and draw them with broad strokes as you see them, but this effort can be advanced if you think of or involve your actual customers. Contemplate the profiles your top five customers represent and respond to the questions as they would, or if feasible, ask if they would be willing to complete a profile for you.
Persona building is not a particularly difficult task and you don’t have to get it right the first time. Take your best shot at it and refine as you go. Through testing, tracking, and tweaking of your content, you will be able to find and fill the gaps. If you need some help, click here to access our B2B persona profiler or here to access our B2C persona profiler.
Here are some ideas for what you might wish to define in your personas. In most cases, you will at least list their demographics, but beyond that consider her or his:
- Needs
- Interests
- Judging functions (thinking or feeling)
- Firmographics
- Job title
- Job description
- Level of seniority
- Budget responsibility
- Work day
- Income
- Age group
- Leisure time
- Pain points
- Values
- Goals
- Preference for collecting information
- Preference for shopping experience
- Trusted advisors
- Position in the sales funnel
More specifically:
- Common objections to your product or service
- Motivation to buy products such as yours
Not all of these considerations will be relevant to your company, or you may need to add to this list, but it’s a good starting point that will help you to understand what makes your persona tick, and tailor communications that respond to those ticks.