Marketing Personas: Why They’re Vital to Your Content Production and How to Create them
Your audience is important to all your content creation. After all, why are you bothering to create content (whether films, socials or even blog posts) if not to engage with the right people? And to really engage with your audience, you need to understand who they are.
That’s where marketing personas matter.
What Is a Marketing Persona?
A marketing persona is also sometimes known as a ‘buyer persona’ or even an ‘ICA’ (‘ideal client avatar’). Regardless of the name, it’s a quasi-fictional description (like a composite sketch) of your customers that helps you to understand what drives them to purchase from you.
Often, you’ll have more than one buyer persona. Each will represent a group of your customers that have similar profiles, buyer goals and customer journeys. Depending on your business and services, you may have only two marketing personas. Or large businesses may have as many as 20. However, it’s best to start small regardless, and identify your main two to five personas to focus on.
Why Are Marketing Personas Vital to Content Creation?
Marketers and business owners don’t always consider buyer personas. Yet, they’re the foundation of all content creation. Personas let you personalise your marketing so that you’re able to strategically target different groups in your audience. So, instead of sending the same direct marketing email to everyone on your list, you can segment these out by buyer persona. This lets you tailor your message to that group’s real problem or needs. And that means you’re responding to each group better (and therefore selling more!).
Personas also help you see your customers as real humans. Because of this, you are better placed to engage with them more authentically. And you’ll find you can produce content that is sensitive to their needs and wants.
Finally, having a strong understanding of your personas lets you better understand your customer’s unique journey. And that means that you’ll be well-equipped to provide value to the buyer at each stage. Better yet, you’ll understand how best to deliver that value, whether that’s through an explainer video, infographics or even a book.
How Do You Create a Marketing Persona?
So, how do you create a marketing persona? The first step is to ask yourself, who do you want to watch your film, or engage with your socials? What will grab their attention, and invoke an emotional reaction? And most importantly, how are you helping to solve a problem? Each of these helps you to understand your audience’s marketing personas.
Once you’ve answered these questions to the best of your ability, it’s time to do some research. The strongest personas are based on industry and market research combined with insights that you get from your actual customer base. When it comes to accessing your customers, simply asking them is the strongest way forward (i.e., interviews), but you can also send out surveys or link queries to purchases.
What Kind of Information Do You Need?
The kind of information you want to obtain will vary depending on your business and the customers. But in general, it will need to include things like:
personal traits of your customer (age, gender, socio-economic)
location
expertise
goals for purchasing
pain points that lead to purchasing
benefits from the service or products
why they sought your service or products
Once you get all the information you can, you need to summarise it into one place. Then you can use that summary information to draft a composite example of the person, or persona, that you are attempting to engage within each group.
Each Marketing Persona Should Include:
About/summary information
Use of products or services
Previous solutions used
Pain points
Benefits from your product
Buying trigger(s)
Buying process
Factors that impact their choice
Working with Primer Associates
We often work with clients to identify their audience personas. We see this as an important first step to creating any content for your brand, whether that’s film, video or digital content.
When you work with us, we like to meet in a workshop environment or face-to-face meeting. Here we can best brainstorm to identify your brand’s primary personas.
Don’t worry if you don’t know who your personas are. Our team will take on the research to identify them and help you to start building out those profiles. Nailing these down succinctly will help you target them effectively through all your communication levels.