A customer persona is, simply put, your perfect customer. It’s a stereotypical person that’s most likely to interact with your brand or buy your goods.
Each brand will provide services to a number of different personas – some will have in excess of 20 different target markets. But what one group of potential customers needs is completely different to what another group needs.
Customers need to be targeted specifically – after all, if you try to please everyone, nobody will like it.
How can you create content that works? By speaking specifically to relevant audiences. And to do that you need to develop personas.
Avoid the people you don’t want
By targeting personas, you can also specifically target who you don’t want to speak to. This means that your content and your investment only speaks to the right people and incurs as little wastage as possible.
So without further ado, let’s discover how to create marketing personas in six easy questions – and a few more sub questions.
Question #1 – What’s their situation?
Establish the general demographics of your chosen persona.
What gender are they? How old are they? What’s their marital situation? Are they well educated? How much do they earn? What do they do in their free time? What’s their favourite David Bowie song?
Question #2 – What’s their name?
Go on, give them a name. It may sound silly, but it’s a great way to personalise a target market.
Question #3 – What are their problems?
Whether you’re a single mother on the dole or a millionaire businessman, everyone has problems and issues. Understanding the troubles and worries of your target market is key to creating content that helps them (more on that in a bit).
Question #4 – What are they looking for?
In keeping with their problems, your personas will also be looking for a variety of things online. They could want:
- To learn new things
- To impress friends, peers and colleagues
- To save money
- To make money
- To buy the right product
- To be entertained
Question #5 – How do they interact online?
Different personas will use the internet in vastly different ways. Getting to know your persona will help you understand, for instance, the specific social networks they use, or the websites they visit to get information.
It’ll also inform you about the type of content you need to create to get their attention.
Likewise, it’ll also help you understand how (and whether) your personas communicate online. Some people will talk on message boards, brand social channels or comments boxes, while others will simply get what they’re looking for and leave.
Question #6 – How can you help?
Once you’ve gleaned all of this information, you can now think about how your brand can help this persona.
You know their problems, what they’re looking for online and where they go to get information. Now, thinking of your brand’s USPs and the specific knowledge of your team, you can identify ways to meet them halfway. That’s how you write content that works.
Talk to us about personas today
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