How to create useful marketing personas
I recently saw a discussion on LinkedIn about how outdated the practice of creating personas for your target audiences is. Too often, marketing teams create personas that are purely based on guess-work and demographic data. Their age, gender, “interests”, location, family, and a rough idea of income. The result is a vague, fictional profile called Tabitha who likes to watch Netflix, has 2 children, and has a little bit of spare income which she likes to spend on Starbucks and the occasional JoJo Moyes novel.
The LinkedIn original post was correct. This type of persona profiling is all too common, but also utterly useless. We’ve created a stereotype, from no reliable data, which doesn’t help us strategically target, communicate, or resonate with our actual audience.
Where do we start?
The demographic details are just the surface. We need to dig into their behaviours, motivations and touchpoints, in order to ensure that our marketing successfully attracts, converts and retains them.
First, before we do any profiling, we need to start with an audit. Gather as much information about your audience as possible using the resources that you have to hand. Not every business can afford a whacking great market research project – but use the tools available to you. Google Analytics, Social Media, Community groups, Google Trends, surveys. Get out there and talk to your existing and potential customers, get to know them.
Use social media polls and surveys to ask questions – why do you follow me? What kind of content do you prefer? What have you been up to this weekend? What’s your favourite thing about our products? Do regular, short polls and over time you will capture useful tidbits of information that helps to build up your profile.
Create personas based on NEED, not demographics
To ensure your personas are as useful as possible, they need to highlight your customers pain points, and how you can offer solutions for these. This exercise will help you to identify your key messaging for each persona.
Make sure you dig into these needs and wants in your surveys and audit stage, don’t make them up! Ask people why they bought your product, if there is anything else out there that would further help, what their values are and how your business aligns with those.
What values do your target audience have?
Dig around to discover what values your audiences prioritise, and ensure that your brand and marketing support these same values. Value-based marketing is incredibly important now, as people want to ensure that they are buying from brands that care about the same things that they do. Whether it be sustainability, ethics, equality, or politics – everyone now has an opinion and you need to ensure that your brand is standing up for these.
Be warned here, consumers are incredibly savvy and they know when you are paying lip service but not following through. A great example is that of Lucy & Yak and their equality campaign, where their business fell short in terms of catering and including plus size customers, their marketing rang out untrue when they pushed that they cared about equality and inclusion. It’s been an up hill battle from there – so ensure that you do practice what you preach, and only promote values that are truly intrinsic to your business.
Where are they online?
Different audiences will be on different platforms, or available online at totally different times. You need to be tracking behaviour through analysing engagement and traffic to ensure that you are posting out content at the best time and on the appropriate platforms. There’s no point in sending out an email marketing campaign to teachers during the Easter break when they may be switched off from work. However, an Easter holiday campaign for parents through social media will be better received – potentially just after the bedtime rush when they may eventually crash on the sofa with a cup of tea and their phone for a bit of mindless scrolling. Think how your audiences think, run ideas past them on social media, put yourself in their shoes.
Then, when you’ve put the content out – keep evaluating it. Make sure that it’s still having the same impact at the same times. Behaviour changes, regularly – so you need to ensure that you are keeping on top of it.
Key takeaways
There’s so much more that can be covered in a useful audience persona – but these are the main points:
What are their motivations and values
Where are they online? And when?
What are their pain points, and how can you help?
So you see, it’s not about Sally, in a semi-detached house with her dog, spending her spare cash on pastries – it’s so much deeper and more useful than that.
Next steps
Do you have a clear idea of who your audiences are, and how you are efficiently communicating with them? If not, that’s where I can help! Let me know if you fancy a chat, and we can book in a free 30 minutes to discuss how I can help with your brand and content marketing strategy.
