You might hear from anyone who is in the marketing world this word that keep floating around. Persona. But what on earth is a persona, and why is it critical that you have them in place before you start any marketing work on your small business? That’s what you’ll find out in this blog post. If you’re more of a visual learner, then check out the video.

What is a persona?

A persona is essential your target market, personified.  The only way you’re going to get customers to do repeat business with you is if you a) provide them with products or services that help them and satisfy their needs, but more importantly if b) know who you’re talking to and directly relate to them when it comes to marketing. Your personas should drill down to the specifics of your target audience such as:

• Demographics - age, sex, socio economic status

• Likes and dislikes - learning how to do things themselves, they prefer brand name over knockoffs, they like going out with friends

• Media Consumption - what TV shows do they watch, which social media networks are they on most often

• Pain points - what’s the problem they need help solving, and what’s the perfect solution you can provide

Resources like customer surveys or your country’s bureau of statistics might help give you some insight into who these people are. Your social pages and Google Analytics will also give you some great data as to who is most often on your site, and some demographic information. All of these aspects end up creating in your mind a version of your target audience. Essentially, you’re telling yourself what your target market looks like online and in the physical world. Having a persona, and especially knowing what their pain points are, can help you just beyond targeting, but also with your value proposition, your tone of voice, what your ad design should look like. 

You can have as many personas as you want, but the more you have, the more diluted your messaging will become. If you have a wide number of personas, see if you can group them and create personas “groups”. When you get into campaign mode, that’s when you can then drill down to the nitty gritty and really target your niche persona. 

Another great tip when creating your persona is giving them a name. If you call them “Persona A” or “Persona Blue," you won’t really think of them as a person. If you give them a name, you start to really think about their character and someone that you, as a business, can relate to.

Why are personas so important?

A few years back personas weren’t that much of a big deal, but now that we are well and truly in the digital age, consumers’ expectations have gotten much higher. They now can search for products or services and receive several options at the click of a button or a tap of a finger.  They can now complain publicly the moment something does not go according to their plan. As Manelle Merhi puts it on the Inbound Buzz podcast “if a brand is not living in the mind of a consumer and is not building a level of trust and a relationship of trust with them, it’s very easy for consumers to jump to a competitor”. Brand loyalty is fast becoming obsolete. The power is no longer with the supplier, but with the consumer, which makes knowing exactly who you are talking to so much more important as you now need to nurture that relationship with them before they sign on the dotted line.

The other reason, and it’s a much more tactical one, is that targeting on social media is becoming so incredibly specific that you now have the ability to create niche audiences. Creating a very broad audience in social media (I’m even talking just city, sex and age. That is even considered broad nowadays) is like throwing papers into the wind, and hoping that someone catches one and reads it. Let’s take an example of a dog biscuit business. If you were creating an ad for this business, you wouldn’t target everyone in the city and just “pet owners,” because then you’ll be catching anyone who owns a pet. You would target adults, probably between the ages of 25 and 45, who are dog lovers and own a dog, whose interests are pet stores, dog parks, and dog training. If you search the word “dog” in the audience tab while you’re creating your audience in Facebook there are a wealth of options. And the better you target, the more people are going to pick up those papers you’ve thrown, because you’ve thrown them in a room full of people who would use your product and you’re speaking their language. They’ll be more engaged with your ad, and more likely to convert into a customer or a lead.

So that’s personas, and why they’re so important. Got any questions or need further assistance? Feel free to drop me a line using the buttons below, or subscribe to my newsletter.