Marketing Persona? How Well Do You Know Your Customer!

According to Forbes.com 8/10 business fail because they do not know their target customers well enough. If your business is failing, it implies you aren’t receiving enough consumers to stay in business, which implies you don’t know your customers well to really understand what makes them want to buy. Good job we have a tool to solve this issue and it is called the marketing persona!

What are Marketing Personas? Marketing persona is the action of creating a expressively detailed summery of your target customers. Understanding everything about them from their personality, wants and physical appearance.

In this article, I will show to the importance of personas and explain why it is essential for your business to have one.

1. WHAT IS MARKETING PERSONA?

Before we go into more detailed explanation, let us first look in more detail what they are.

A marketing persona is a detailed profile of your typical taregt audience. They are semi-fictional depiction of your ideal customer, which include all the attributes, which make them lifelike.
This can include a picture, name, profession, education, like/dislikes, hobbies etc…

Not only are they semi-fictional but they are composed of real market data. They are not a real person, rather a depiction of a person based from factual data.

2. WHY ARE MARKETING PERSONAS IMPORTANT?

By having a composite sketch of your target customers you are able to create a mental image and have a better presresentation of whom your targettting.

Moreover, by having a mental image of your target audience you are able communicate with these people more relevantly and effectively.

This will increase the efficiency of your overall business from content marketing, developing real products to solving challenges for your audience.

3. THE PROCESS OF CREATING PERSONAS

Marketing personas can be created in a variety of ways. Getting a well formed persona requires a lot of research and heavy lifting from the ground up. The process itself is simple but very time consuming. This is why it can be frightening and overwhelming, which is why some marketers give up or settle for half-formed personalities that don’t provide them with the information they require.

The process of creating personas include:

1. Market research – You need to conduct market research to have the information ready to utilise and later turn into commendable knowledge. this includes gathering information of the people in the market
2. Segmentation – this includes grouping those people by their similar attributes such as age, gender etc.. After you have grouped your customers this is already great insight, to which the customers that provide the most the most value can be assessed in the next phase of targeting.
3. Targeting – this is includes assessing which groups are most relevant to your business. By knowing whom your business aims to target you can begin to create personas of these groups of people.
4. Personas – this includes creating a detailed profiles of the target groups. Creating a persona on every segment can be time consuming and you don’t want to target everyone as mass marketing is not as effective.

Remember that you dont want to target every segment only those that fit within your brand messaging threshold. So each segment should be prioritised by importance. Any segment that deviates from your core brand messaging is less important.

4. Persona Template

As well as giving your personas a name, gender, occupation, marital status and occupation we outline four addition important factors.

1. What does the customer need?
2. When and where do they need it?
3. How do they currently deal with this issue?
4. How can we help them better solve this problem they have?

Job, role, and company

During the market research process, you will most likely create surveys, or have some form of method to collect and record customer information about the people you’ve investigated.

When capturing this information you could include fields in the survay that capture this information simply by including a field in the survay, or through an bio section within your online application, & account settings.

To sure to include the fields such as job title, company size, and type of business.

Demographic information

Demographic information includes age, gender, income, education, social status and family.

You can get some good insights of these things from your Google analytics. Google analytics has basic automated information such as age, gender, affinity, and technology, which can be utilised into your personas knowledge.

However, Google analytics may not be as accurate as survey bio information and interviews in controlled and uncontrolled environments.

Goals and challenges

To understand your target customers and their goals/challenges you need to go out and find them in person. You will seek the answers to some of the following questions:

• What do they consider important aspect of their life?
• What is provoking their need to switch products?
• How do they go about their day-to-day routine?
• What information do they look for to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What is the value they visualize once they make a decision?

While coming up with these goals and challenges, you can also identify the ways in which you can help customers meet these goals and overcome the challenges. You can do this by putting yourself in the shoes of your customer, host actual customer interviews will be helpful in determining the objectives here.

Elevator pitch

An elevator pitch is a 30-second pitch of the solution that meets your target customer’s needs.

The elevator pitch will require two things:

How you might describe your product for this particular type of person
A consistent message how this person would prefer to be sold to

Elevator pitches are good because they help you get straight to your point and communicate your message more clearly that it will appeal to more people.

Persona Example

This Example is from a hubspot presentation (YouTube, 2018).

Conclusion

In this post we learned about how to create a persona  to finalise your customer profiling for your marketing strategy.