The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Marketing Personas

Marketing Personas: No matter if you are running an online business or offline, you can’t deny the fact that all your customers aren’t the same. In fact, all of them have their own personas. All of them have their own personal interests, liking and different way of thinking. 

But when it comes to managing a business, especially running ads for it. You have to think about the customer’s persona at a new level. And the only way to do so would be to create a team of buyer personas who can organize the types of customers that visits your shop.

What is a persona in marketing?

The purpose behind making a team of a buyer persona is pretty simple, it allows you to generate data of the individuals whom you are targeting through your marketing. Without having accurate data, you will not be able to be sure about your offerings as well if your marketing campaign will be successful or not.

But the question is how you are going to do it? Well to help you out with this, I am going to share 5 tips which will help you to understand the whole thing. So let’s just head into the topic without wasting much of the time:

Stay Focused To Your Goals

When you run a business, there are multiple things that happen, and you have to deal with all of them alone or with your friend. However, whatever situation you face, make sure to stay focused on your goals. With so much happening with your business, it is quite obvious for you to forget why you have certain tools.

First of all, you have a marketing personas plan along with a top-notch content marketing strategy and an awesome team behind you. So it is better not to ignore these things but utilize them for something good.

So my advice for you would be to understand how you can relate to your business goals instead of jumping to creating a buyer persona. This way, you will be able to come up with better plans and strategies that work for you.

If you do this correctly, then the buyer persona will give you a 360-degree overview of the customer. By using these insights, you will be able to close deals, write better email copy that converts into sales. As well as revamp your brand identity. 

By using actionable buyer personas, you will be able to align with your overall business strategies. Also, while you are creating marketing personas, you have to break it down into multiple layers. 

Niche Personas

For example, you can create a persona of those customers whose buying concerns you can change through your funnel. Then there is the awareness stage where the customer worries about his need for a new product.

After that, the same customer worries about the right vendor to purchase the product finally. So you have to do an analysis on multiple levels. 

By doing the analysis you will also get accurate information about specific buyers as it relates to their willingness to buy your product. As well as by doing so, you will be able to adjust your company goals and come up with better plans. 

Research Your Audience

There are quite a lot of companies that make a common mistake that they make a buyer persona without doing proper research. And if you are doing the same, stop right there. If you have decided an object and started developing a persona then you are probably wrong. 

In most of the cases, companies start to realize after a couple of time that they do not know about your ideal customers. Hence, they cant proceed with their marketing personas further.

You cannot get a proper idea about your customers by looking at graphs as it only gives you an overview. But if you have to go deep down and research hard to find out who your real customers are. 

To avoid this mistake, the simple thing that you can do is focus on researching your audience. Like why they purchase a certain product while purchasing a product what kind of decisions they make and what influences them to purchase something. 

You can grab this information in multiple ways, like by taking a survey, asking different customer, analytics dashboard, blog comments and so on. Even researching gives you and your team enough opportunity to understand your true customers and serve them in a better way.

So always do focus on researching and gathering information. As well as you have to be really careful with the data you collect and better not share it with third party authorities without the concern of your customers. 

Overall, the bottom line of the story is that the more you research the more you get to learn. And then you will be able to serve your customers the best way possible.

Create the Persona

Now coming to the main part which is creating the persona. You have done your research right and gathered enough data from your customers. Now it is time to create the persona. You have to start by assembling all the information that you have collected in an appropriate way.

So your team can extract the key information out and come up with a persona. You will also have to develop a persona that fits the many learning styles of your team members.

You can start so by giving your persona a name, like John Doe. This will help you to make the persona document a real thing for you and your team. You can also add a picture of one of your customers to make it even look more authentic. 

Next, you have to add background info about your buyer. Like his or her age, gender, job role, etc. Make sure to use bullet points, as they are easy to read. 

Furthermore, you can also add the buyer’s interests, motivation and behaviors. This will give your team enough idea about the customer’s habits.

To make an authentic buyer persona, I would advise to collaborate with your team and discuss what can be added in the persona.  Since all the department has a different view so they can help you create an insight into the buyer. 

Integrate the Persona Into Your Business Strategy

Integrating the persona into your strategy is one of the vital steps that you have to go through. You have to turn a document into a practical tool that you will be using for your marketing. 

You will also need to get information from different departments and shape your persona. And you can use the persona to help them and make it easy for anyone to apply the data.

For example, if the customer department gives you information about customer behavior then you can create a persona that will help your customer care team to learn how to respond to a customer based on their communication styles. 

As well as other teams can use the persona to learn more about your targeted customers and how they can serve them. As well as there are other techniques that helps you to design engagement scenarios for your persona.

You can prepare your team to interact with all your customers at multiple circumstances. No matter what situation you are in, a buyer persona will help you to come up with an innovative persona that works. 

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is not just a piece of paper. In fact, it matters more than that. They are the living documents which will adapt to your customer’s lifestyle and behaviors. So you better evaluate your persona once or twice in a year. This way, you will be able to make sure that your persona is valid and can still be used.

You can say that evaluating your persona is updating your customer’s occupation and goals. Even in certain cases, you may have to start with scratch. Also, during your evaluation, I would advise you to consult with a senior manager. Ask them if they will be targeting new personas or they would like to remove a persona. 

You also may discover that the customer journey altered, which greatly reflects the buyer’s purchasing habits. Also, with the team input, you will be able to customize the personas in greater detail.

In the end, there is no wrong or right way to build a customers persona, nor there is a way to evaluate it. The main goal of yours should be to develop the process which offers a realistic view of your customers.  The more accurate information you gather, the better way you will be able to create marketing campaigns and get more and more sales and leads.

Final Words

So that was all for The Complete, Actionable Guide to Marketing Personas. In the end, you should spend your time learning about your customer’s behaviors.

As it is the only thing that can help you to create a persona and skyrocket your sales. Anyway, if you have any more questions to ask. Then do feel free to comment below.