Personas 101
Personas are a common tool used in marketing. They help personalize the customer experience and give insight to how people interact with your brand. In short, personas are profiles of your target market. They are created to reach people on a personal level and find out how to meet their needs.
Persona Creation
- Research
To dive deep into who your target market is takes research and finding answers to questions. For best results, we encourage organizations to interview current, past, and/or potential users. You may also draw from analytics and interviewing employees that work closest with your users.
- Look for Patterns
Look for common patterns that pop up in research. You’re looking for commonality among your target markets. For example, gender may not be a factor as much as other demographics like age or geography.
- Define
Start to define who your target user is by defining key demographics. Much like you would build a profile for a character in a book, you start to construct your user persona.
Who are they?
What are their problems?
What are their motivations?
What are their goals?
Journey Mapping
Once you have your personas defined, it’s time to understand how they interact with your brand. An effective tool is a journey map. Journey maps help you understand the users mindset, emotions, and actions. It allows your team to identify gaps in content to help them move to the next stage of the sales funnel.
What is a sales funnel?
Awareness - The user becomes aware of your brand.
Consideration - The user wants to learn more about your brand.
Comprehension - The user gains a deeper understanding of your brand and how your brand can help them.
Conversion - The user interacts with your brand by either a purchase, consultation, or request for more information.
Advocacy - The user promotes your brand and shares their experience with others.
Once we start to map the user journey to the sales funnel, we get something like this:
Summary
Just like project, you need the write tools. Personas give you the write tool to help structure your message and publish to select channels. Without a narrow message or approach, you may be wasting valuable dollars trying to attract the wrong person to your brand.
