HOW TO CREATE EFFECTIVE MARKETING PERSONAS?
Effective marketing strategy involves not just knowing what to say but also knowing when and how to say it to your target audience. Understanding your target audience is essential for crafting the right message and communicating it effectively.
How do marketers accomplish it? How do they understand the audience so well?
One of the magic tricks performed at just about the beginning of anything related to marketing is called Marketing Personas aka Buyer Personas.
Marketing Personas are semi-fictional characters of your potential customers giving you deep audience insights into their lives, allowing you to create a clear and effective communication strategy.
Below, we’ll define marketing personas, explain why marketing personas are important, and provide tips for developing personas for your own business.
WHAT ARE MARKETING PERSONAS?
A marketing persona is a fictional representation of a key segment of your target audience that helps you create a marketing strategy that is more relevant and valuable to your customers.
By giving faceless consumers concrete identifiers, marketing personas assist brands in figuring out what to say, how to say it, and when to say it.
A marketing persona should include specific details about the fictional customer, including:
- Demographic details such as Name, Age, Gender, Location, Education Level, etc.
- Professional details such as Job Title, Income Level, Industry, etc.
- Psychographic details such as their Goals & Motivations, Challenges & Fears, etc.
Now, Let’s decipher these data sets with an example and see how you can use them to draw insights.
Let’s say that your company sells furniture items like Beds, Sofas, TV units, Dining Tables, etc.
A persona for one ideal customer might describe a 35-year-old couple Aruna and Harsh who have been married for the last 11 years and have recently bought their dream home in Hyderabad. They have a 7-year-old daughter. They are in the process of doing up their new home and are looking at options for furniture, painting etc. They are keen to get furniture that reflects their personality, is easy to maintain and does not take too much time to execute.
Demographic Details: The basic level of information that will allow you to humanize the user persona. Let’s begin by listing all the essential demographic details about your ideal customers such as
- Name : Aruna & Harsh
- Age: 35-year-old couple
- Location: Hyderabad
- Relationship status: Married
- Interests: Browsing through interior decor magazines, Watching home organisation & home improvement videos
- Preferred Social Media Platforms: Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest
Professional Details:
- Job Title: Both work at an MNC in Senior positions
- Income Level: Annual HH income ~INR 80 lakhs
- Home Ownership : 3 BHK with attached terrace in a Premium gated community
Psychographic Details: –
Goals & Motivations:
- To create a home that would reflect their personality and aesthetics
- To fulfil their dream of creating a comfortable life full of experiences in everything they do – be it food, fashion, travel or shopping
- To be able to give back to society and create an impact
Challenges & Fears:
- Managing time while trying to balance professional, personal and social needs
- Not getting quality in terms of product/ service despite spending the money
- Not being able to stay relevant to the changing times
The goals & motivations are what your audience wants to achieve and your offering can help them get there. These are their desires and through your marketing communication, you need to paint a picture of what their life could look like once the problem is solved.
But getting to this desired state is not easy for anyone.
There will be challenges and obstacles that will stop them from reaching their goals. It would be helpful if you described what they have tried previously to solve their problems and why it didn’t work.
Let’s now visualise how this persona looks when we populate all the information we have, about them :
Your message to Aruna & Harsh should communicate these values in a way that targets those, who are still in the consideration phase of their shopping.
WHY ARE MARKETING PERSONAS IMPORTANT?
Marketers focus on meeting audiences’ needs profitably. You can see from the examples above that marketing personas help you identify more fully who those customers are or maybe.
When you can put details like name, age, and range of interests, goals, motivations & challenges to a customer, you can better illuminate their values and get a clear understanding of what that person needs from your product, service, or marketing strategy.
So personas help you have a deep understanding of your audience… but why is that so important? In short, if you don’t understand who your audience is, you can’t understand their needs. If you don’t understand their needs, you can’t meet them – let alone profitably.
You can start developing content to attract more individuals to your business once you’ve created your personas. You may help your business rank when clients are searching for solutions to their most common problems by using keywords in blogs and social media material. This will drive new leads to your business.
Personas can also help you pinpoint how best to contact your customers. For example, knowing which social media platforms are most popular among certain demographics will help you ascertain which platforms to use to get in touch with your target audience.
Personas are frequently used in content marketing to create blog posts, social media posts, and even email broadcasts. Understanding your audience can help you determine the best tone, style, and language to use to speak to your customers.
Different kinds of promotions appeal to different kinds of people. For example, the frugal-minded may wait for sales, limited-time products, or other discount deals. In contrast, contests and giveaways excite more competitive types. Fortunately, your personas can help you determine which promotions are most likely to motivate which segment of your customers.
Finally, knowing the problems or challenges that your customers face can point you toward new product and service lines. Ultimately, finding ways to solve these issues for your customers could open new doors for your business.
To sum it all up, Marketing Personas are important in all of the following tasks:
- Refining Ad Campaigns
- Content Marketing (including email campaigns and blog posts)
- Social Media Marketing (such as on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn)
- General Problem-Solving Marketing
- Efficient Product Development
CONCLUSION
You’ll be able to better grasp how to appeal to your audience if you can see your business through their eyes. Personas help you better understand your clients’ desires and motivations so you can produce better content, products, services, and promotions.
Connect with us if you need any help crafting detailed personas for an efficient marketing strategy for your business.
Do you have any questions about how marketing personas are created or used? Let us know in the comments section below!
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