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 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 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:
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…
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.
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!
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. ;-)
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?
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! ;-)
Last update: August 06, 2024