A guide to developing customer personas

A Guide to Developing Customer Personas

Posted on in Small Business Tips, SME Marketing

Giving your target audience a face and a name can be really useful when producing your marketing content…

When a magazine is launched, one of the first jobs for the launch team is to identify their target market. To make it easier for the journalists and designers to adapt their style to suit, they often create fictional characters, and then when they pitch a story or work on a style idea, they’ll ask if those people – let’s call them John and Kate – would like it.

Content marketers should be doing a similar thing. After all, there is no end to the content that you can produce – as we have considered before – whether it is in blog, podcast, or video format. But if it doesn’t appeal to your target market, you’re wasting your time and effort.

Your customer personas

These people you invent are called personas, which basically means someone who would buy your product or service. The persona nails down their lifestyle – job, responsibilities, character traits and so on. Basically, it puts those impersonal A1, B2 demographic descriptions of old into someone you can imagine in real life.

And creating a persona works just as well whether you are running a consumer or B2B service – after all, even in B2B marketing you have to appeal to a person at the end of the day – and in a business context, being able to humanise them can be even more useful.

Who are they?

So, where to start? Well there’s a series of questions you need to answer to develop your persona.

Let’s start with demographics: you’ll want to know how old they are, how educated they are, whether they have special qualifications to do their job – a degree or a professional qualification maybe. Next, you should consider where they sit in the organisation of the company that they represent – do they manage a team, who do they report to, whereabouts in the hierarchy do they sit?

Then you need to think about their behaviours and their daily life. What responsibilities do they have on a daily basis both at home and at work; how does an average day look, what makes their (working) life harder, and what would make it easier? You could also look at where they gather information and what they read on a daily basis.

How can we help them?

Next you can start looking at the interaction they are likely to have with your company – can your product or service help them, why would they come to you for help, what sort of engagement

and interaction will they have with your company, and what sort of content are they likely to engage with? Think about blogs, videos, ebooks and so on.

When you have all this information, you can create your prospective ‘customer personas’ and use these to target any of your future marketing content.

If you would like to have a chat about your marketing requirements, please call Alison Page on tel: 07963 002065 or email: hello@alisonpagemarketing.co.uk. You can of course browse our website to see what our existing clients have to say about our work.