Do you really know who your customers are? Are you aware of their age, education, wealth, needs and desires? If not, you won’t be able to create effective marketing campaigns. All the factors listed are included into what we call marketing personas. Do you want to learn what a persona is in marketing? How can they help with content marketing? Why and how to create them? Then read this article – we are going to answer these questions in detail!

What is a persona in marketing?

Marketing personas are profiles, a kind of reflection of your target groups. They are created, since marketing to ‘everyone’ would simply be not effective.

Building marketing personas is a way to categorize your target clients. They are imaginary persons with traits typical for a particular target group, hence their name. The aim of creating them is simple – to understand your potential clients better, and thus provide them with relevant marketing materials.

Marketing persona

Why is creating a persona for marketing so important?

Imagine you are selling vacuum cleaners. They are top-notch, yet don’t cost an arm and a leg. You want to sell them to a wide audience. What will your marketing materials look like?

1st option – You underline their price.

2nd option – You underline their quality.

In the first scenario, wealthy people will be discouraged from buying them. After all, how can something cheap be better than the premium segment vacuum cleaners? In the second one, on the other hand, the less prominent customers will be discouraged. They will think: “Surely, I won’t be able to afford something like that”.

Both of these values are important for different groups of people for which your product is designed. But, approaching the client with the wrong value might discourage them. This is what you need marketing personas.

By creating a persona for both of these group, you will actually be able to choose the right value to promote your product with. What is more, you will be capable of targeting each group with different content, adjusted to their needs and the values they respect.

How can marketing personas help with content marketing?

Content marketing is all about the message. But, in life, we communicate differently depending on who we are talking to. So, apart from finding pain points and understanding the most important values in potential customer groups, marketing personas serve one additional purpose for content marketing – defining the style and tone.

You will use different language and media to reach out to generation Z than baby boomers. Both of these are on different stages of their lives, have different priorities. You don’t want to communicate with construction workers the same way as you do with lawyers, either. This is how marketing personas can help content marketing – you know who is the recipient of your message and adjust the style accordingly.

It even goes as far as to executing some content strategies. Influencer marketing is an example of that – you need to choose influencers who have similar target personas as you do, otherwise it will not prove effective.

How to create marketing personas?

No matter whether personas are required for your content strategy, or for you to create better products, you need to know how to create them. You should combine several actions to do that:

  • Gather data – Every customer or client leaves some kind of data behind. You need to collect and analyze it. This way, you might be able to recognize some basic features of your marketing personas – age, education, geolocation.
  • Research reviews – Post your business on as many services with reviews as possible. Facebook, Google Maps, Yelp, Instagram, YouMap – all of these are excellent channels to reach out to your clients and gather opinions. As a result, you will learn the typical pain points of your customers, which you can include into your personas.
  • Make a draft – Before sitting down to creating your marketing personas, make a relevant draft. What information should it include? Name (think of a relevant one), age (range), gender (if applicable), job (if applicable), communication channels, pain points, the ways in which your product/service can help them.

The key takeaways

Personas are crucial for marketing – they let you understand who you are trying to reach out to. You don’t only need to create them, but constantly update the profiles and ensure that all the content is relevant for these target groups. But, the prize is worth it – using marketing personas can enhance the effectiveness of your marketing strategies significantly.

Was this article helpful? Read our other articles on marketing, for instance: How Mapping Can Help Market Your Business