There is information about your audience that you probably already know. Their age, their gender, their location. This is undoubtedly useful information. But did you know you could go even deeper?

The deeper you go, the clearer the picture of your ideal buyer comes. And with that, you can create more targeted content, improve your product, and increase sales.

Marketing personas are an effective way of representing in-depth and reliable information about your customers.

 

What is a marketing persona?

A marketing persona balances somewhere between fiction and non-fiction. On the one hand, Director Dave and CEO Chloe don’t actually exist. However, the information surrounding them is authentic.

Marketing personas are characters created based on data gathered about your audience and prospective customers.

You will be able to layout their interests, pain points, objectives, and any misconceptions they might have.

Having this image of your audience allows you to focus your time on future prospects, provide guidance to your product/service developments, and gives you a clear picture of your ideal consumer that you can share across your business.

You can then use your marketing persona to tailor your website and messaging to match their wants and needs.

All of this valuable information will invite more website visitors, leads, and conversions that you are more likely to retain.

How do you write one?

Creating marketing personas is essentially breaking down the highest trends amongst your audience and putting those pieces together to give you a clear picture of who and how you should be targeting.

The most reliable and accurate personas are based on market research and information you gather from your current customer database. This can be done by conducting surveys, interviews, or by speaking with their sales team and getting feedback on leads they’ve most interacted with.

Platforms like Hubspot provide buyer persona templates for you to use. But you can also create them yourself based on your unique needs.

There are four key areas you should focus on when creating a persona:

1. Who? What’s their age, gender, occupation, and income. Do they have children? Where are they located?
2. What? What are their goals? What challenges are they currently facing? You can then use this information to tie in how your company can help.
3. Why? Use interviews to gather real quotes from customers or leads about who they are and what they’re looking for. You can then use this to create a list of objections they might have and prepare your sales team to address these during talks with prospective customers.
4. How? All of this information will allow you to elevate your business and sales team’s efforts in a way that will resonate with your persona.

 

How to use them on your website

Marketing personas give you a deeper understanding of your target buyers. You may already know their age and gender, but do you know what they like? What they don’t like? What are their concerns?

You can tailor your website and your messaging to target their specific needs and pain points. You can use the same language they used in surveys or interviews to better communicate to them in a way you know will be relevant.

Through your persona research, you might find out that your target buyer is not only 45 and lives in Auckland but absolutely hates websites that don’t have chatbots. Or it could tell you that your ideal customer is attracted to websites with lots of team photos.

Once you have your data collected, you can put a face and a name to this persona. Make them a real person whose needs your organisation focuses on. Data collected from social media or Google is still important, but this way, you can bring to life your audience by collecting their most pressing needs into a single figure.

Having this understanding of your customers is critical when it comes to content creation, product/service development, web design, and sales techniques.

By adhering to what your persona truly wants, you will see dramatic changes in your sales and conversations.