Marketing persona creation

As you probably already know, in the marketing field, finding your target audience and knowing who you’re talking to are essential, whether for your communication or for your product / service development or release.

To know your customers and their expectations, a simple concept emerged years ago: the marketing persona.

And since we are nice people, we are going to refresh your memory...

A persona, what is it all about?

A marketing persona depicts your standard customer profile: half fictional, half real. They are defined according to their personal characteristics, demographic and psychological attributes, motivations and goals.

Key Inbound Marketing concept, the persona can be used in any field of activity. It allows you to develop a content strategy corresponding to your target audience, their needs and expectations.

Your buyer persona will let you understand how your customer operates and above all, if different profiles emerge. Moreover, it will help you make the right decisions by quickly identifying the motivations and pain points specific to each customer segment. Your buyer persona will be useful to create an effective storytelling for your brand.

Now that we have provided background, we can go through the steps of creating the persona: how to do it?

Data search to build a persona

Data search is a key element to define your persona, you will understand who is your target audience after this step. 

At this stage, the goal is to collect as much information as possible about your users, in order to generate standard data and find some similarities between customers. To get the most accurate persona, it’s crucial to combine as many users as possible with all their information.

To gather information, you have several options:

• Google Analytics: Google Analytics can be used to upgrade your website, but not only. This well established tool for business also allows to understand your audience type. Thus you can mainly collect some demographic and geographic information. Moreover, Google Analytics can also provide some details about the kind of device your audience use, and about what they do on your website. In short, about the criteria needed when creating your buyer persona.

• Your social media accounts: in the digital age, social media should be a part of any serious marketing strategy! In addition to the data collected from Google Analytics to develop your persona, do not hesitate to take advantage of the different social platforms you use. Thus, you will be able to know which network your audience use, at what time of day and what topics they are interested in.

• Qualitative surveys: conduct surveys for your customers, in order to know their expectations, their opinions, their pain points and motivations. To do that, you can use some simple tools like Google forms, Typeform or even Survio. The slight advantage of these tools is their user-friendliness and the ease of getting results, because most of them provide an automatic overview, on a dashboard.

• Phone calls: phone your customers, interact with them. Interview them, in order to question them about themselves, and also about their relationship with your brand. Don’t spend too much time with one person, in average 20 minutes should be fine, if you have prepared a list of questions beforehand.

• Customer feedbacks: conduct an impact analysis, study your strengths and weaknesses using tools, such as chat, email and contact forms.

• Focus on group: first, within your company, in order to discover how your employees perceive your customers. Then externally, to confirm what has been said, or not. 

As you have certainly understood, the key to build your buyer persona is to know your audience like the back of your hand, and be aware of what they expect from you and your products or services.

Now you have the tools to collect as much data as possible, let’s move to the next step…

Summary of the results

Once your data collection is completed, you can go through the synthesis stage to define your buyer persona. The collected data will help you create your customer profile.

Establish a list of questions, based on the information previously collected.

Generally, when defining a persona, the questions to raise are split in 3 categories: private life, work life and relationship between your persona and your company. You will find below a non-exhaustive list of questions that can be adapted to your brand.

Private life of your persona

• Where does he or she live?
• How old is he / she?
• What are his / her hobbies?
• What is his / her family situation?
• Which digital tools does he / she use?
• Is it a man or a woman?
• Which social media does he / she use?

Work life of your persona

• What is his / her business and his / her job?
• How long has he / she been doing this job?
• What are his / her incomes?
• What is his / her professional goal?
• What is his / her typical day?

Relation between your persona and you

• What does he / she like with your product?
• What does he / she hold against your product?
• Would he / she recommend your product?
• What is his / her purchasing behaviour?
• Does he / she like new technologies?
• Where does he / she go for shopping (online, physical shops)?
• What devices does he / she use to search for products or services?

After answering these questions using the collected data, major trends will emerge and thus will allow you to define your buyer persona.

So this learning phase is all fine and well, but now, what are we going to do with this data?

Let’s go to the next step!

Designing your persona

That’s the key stage, when you should'nt make any mistakes: the graphic representation of your persona.

Here you have to select information related to your persona according to the collected data. Thus you will see your persona's frustrations and motivations: choose his / her first name, a representative picture of him or her, and write a biography to illustrate his / her behavior and his / her personality.

In short, you’re free to choose what information should be displayed on the persona profile. However, some information is essential: first name, age, job, picture and third person narrative.

Instead of worrying about manually creating your perfect persona, you have to know that several tools already exist.

We give you all the information below, stay connected. ;-)

How to use your buyer persona?

Last step, but not the least, now, how will you be able to wisely use your persona?

First, release the profile to your team. It’s important that everyone can visualize it. It will help with making the right design choices for a new product or service, but also with developing your marketing content strategy.

By using your persona, you’ll be aware of the pain points encountered by your users, as well as their tastes, and therefore you’ll know how to interact with your audience.

We finish with certainly the most interesting thing for you: the means provided by the internet to easily create a buyer persona... This is good, isn’t it?

Buyer persona creation tools

• Xtensio : by far, the most beloved tool, it’s one of the most complete online tool, and it is really easy to use. You can directly create your personas from predefined templates, then compare and share them. Even though a number of comprehensive templates exist, the tool is completely customizable and flexible: add some pie charts, graphs, text areas… In short, almost anything you want! 

• Makemypersona : Intuitive and simple tool for creating your buyer persona. It’s perfect if you want to quickly make your persona, according to a preset model. You won’t be able to add more tools than those already set up as with Xtensio and you’ll have to settle for an avatar instead of a real picture.

As you could understand, a persona is a requirement and it will make your daily life easier in your marketing approach. Use your persona in all your strategies and thus improve your entire value chain, get better!  

However, don’t forget your personas have a limited lifespan over time. It’s essential to effectively organize your competitive intelligence in order to stay up to date.

Your customers' behaviours evolve indeed, just like their needs and expectations. Therefore, it’s essential for you to update your buyer persona when it’s required.   

And now, go ahead, it is your turn! ;-)