First and foremost, what is a marketing persona?
‘Marketing Persona’ – Sure, you have heard the term, but you’ve always been a little confused on what exactly is a persona and how to create personas. Such a dynamic marketing tool requires your company’s time and dedication in developing, and here is how!
A marketing persona is a categorization of your audience based on differing criteria. Personas take on the universal role of a group of customers who share similar selling points. This essentially means that you take your target audience and break it down into representative groups.
Personas are critical for marketing because they provide outlines of which audience you want to target, therefore impacting how you develop and present content. As you know, different people require different marketing content; personas are the solution! Using a content marketing persona, you can develop a customer-centric strategy, compared to just one broad strategy that would be better reached with specified communication.
How to create personas?
To create personas you start by creating a profile that includes the name, job title, demographics, goals and challenges, values and fears, marketing messages, and an elevator pitch. It is suggested to use a real name for the persona to make the individual, and in extension, the group, feel like real people, such as Josh or Angelica. The job title will define their position, such as the Marketing Director or Salesperson. Demographics include information such as age range, education level, and average salary.
The goals and challenges are the objectives and difficulties this user persona faces and how your services or product will solve their problems. The values or fears are principles and concerns that guide the user persona when making decisions. How to create the personas starts by positioning yourself from the perspective of the target audience to determine what material or information they may need to complete the deal based on their goals, challenges, values and fears. Using this information, you can establish key selling points that shape the marketing messages and elevator pitch.
The process of developing a persona and completing their profile requires data gathering and dissecting your analytics. Use commonalities in your target audience such as job titles, keywords, page stay length, etc., to group your marketing personas. It is best to involve your entire team to create personas because each department can contribute trends found among a marketing persona to make the profile as robust as possible. Last, using surveys or interviews companies can complete a deliberate, in-depth profile of the personas.
It takes dedicated time to develop these personas. But, it’s worth it.
Benefits of using a Marketing Persona
Developing personas will serve as an effective marketing resource because they establish consistent messaging to assure dependability and recognition; facilitate understanding of customer needs, wants, and common actions to cater how your services solve their problems; and guide personalized and calculated sales processes to complete more deals.
Personas are essential because they enhance user experience through directed and individualized marketing initiatives. The completion of these steps to create personas are a calculated leap to convert your marketing effectiveness.
Put Your Personas to Work
Once you have your personas created, now it’s time to use them in your marketing. One of the most common applications is using personas in your marketing automation.
At Evolve Systems, our recommended marketing automation is SharpSpring. We explain the ways you can use personas in SharpSpring to increase conversions.
