Because of this, it’s important to develop marketing personas to ensure you’re able to create more targeted marketing campaigns. These personas are essentially profiles or avatars that represent groups of relatively similar people within your defined target audience. Proper use of these personas makes it easier to understand how you can best reach out to people and deliver more personal marketing messages that get them interested in what you have to offer.
Here are a few tips to help you make stronger use of marketing personas for your company.
Gather as much information as possible
When first developing your marketing personas, you should be prepared to ask a lot of questions, starting with general questions first. Get general age groupings and figure out “types,” like “soccer moms” or “middle-aged men who own boats.” After you’ve got your general types and demographics figured out, you can conduct interviews and surveys to find out about their ambitions, pain points, favorite activities, general attitudes, interests and personalities. The more information you gather the better—the idea is to figure out what motivates these people to buy specific types of products.
Analyze the data and find patterns
Large-scale collection of this data allows you to carefully analyze it and find patterns of similar responses. Based on these similar responses, you can create personas to represent each group of people who had similar responses. Let’s say you have a coffee shop that is located in a relatively young area of town. You might have uncovered a couple main categories of people: college students who use the coffee shop to study and young professionals recently out of school. You can create fictional names for these personas and general quotes that give an idea of what they stand for. For example, you might have Joe the College Student, who would say something like, “I’m here every Monday and Wednesday between classes to get in some extra studying,” or Kayla the Young Professional, who might say something like, “I commute to work every day at a big company, but like to stop and support a local coffee shop along the way.”
Map out the customer’s journey
We recently published a blog post that goes into greater detail about how you can map out your customer’s journey, so we highly recommend you read that. But the general idea is that you should consider all of the situations in which a customer would interact with your brand and, based on their persona, the best way you can structure those interactions to ensure their needs are being met.
Practice empathy
Empathy is important in learning how to handle customer personas. You should be able to put your personas in hypothetical situations, write down what they would feel or think in a specific situation, what their needs are in that situation, the reasons for those needs and how you can fill those needs as a company.
Marketing personas allow you to create much more targeted branding initiatives. Spin Creative is here to help.
Say hello!Spin Creative is a video production company and creative agency helping marketers create winning video and creative strategies that engage, inspire and activate targeted audiences. Spin is headquartered in Seattle with offices in San Francisco and London, serving brands around the globe.
