What is persona development and how do I create one?
Author: Ria Loughlin
The ability to truly understand your customer is underrated. Getting this right is crucial to having a successful digital marketing strategy. It will enable you to target your potential customers and at the right time and in the right place.
So what is a persona?*
Hubspot says that a buyer persona is a 'semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers'.
Digital Marketing Institute defines it as 'a personality that embodies a key segment of your audience'.
It's a valuable shorthand for someone who has the same interests, priorities and concerns as your buyers.
A lot of research goes into persona development. It is the breakdown of potential customers' goals, interests, pain points and other demographic characteristics. Hubspot blog say that 'personas help us all - in marketing, sales, product, and services - internalise the idea customer we're trying to attract and relate to our customers as real humans'.
How do you create a persona?*
- Research - don't underestimate the effort involved in the research phase, this is the foundation to getting the personas right. Here you analyse your current customer. You understand their preferences, where they tend to buy, what their challenges are? This is where your analytics pay off but you also shouldn't be afraid to speak to your customers directly.
- Analyse your findings - once the research is done, now it's time to analyse your findings. Have you uncovered any themes or patterns amongst them? Here is where you will discover commonalities and include them in the description of your persona.
- Create your persona - once you've gathered all your findings, it's time to start creating who your personas will be. Here you would group together common information and create your fictional ideal customer. This will include their common characteristics, behaviours and other values or criteria.
- Add the details - filling in details and creating a character will hep you visualise them better, You will give your persona a name, age, job title etc.
- Apply to your digital marketing strategy - one you have all these steps done, you can start applying to your digital marketing strategy.
At Digital Marketing Strategy we have multidisciplinary teams with strategists, researchers and data scientists to create new personas or review and update existing personas as part of creating your digital marketing strategy.
Below is an example of a persona created using a Hubspot template.
If any of this sounds of interest to you, please get in touch.
#persona #marketing #strategy
Reference list:
Dimitriya Paunova, 2019: What are marketing personas and how will they help you
https://www.simplifie.com/marketing-blog/what-are-marketing-personas-and-how-will-they-help-you#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20marketing%20persona%3F&text=Essentially%2C%20a%20persona%2C%20whether%20you,is%20based%20on%20extensive%20research
Great article. I really like how you have given a holistic overview of the steps involved in developing a marketing persona. Before reading this, I would have never thought to carry out this exercise as part of my situation analysis. I like how you suggest using a direct and indirect approach to understanding your customers - examining your analytics but also speaking directly with your customers. I'm a recent graduate starting. my career in marketing and I found this article super helpful.
ReplyDeleteWow a very interesting article . I would have never thought there was so much involved in the creation of a persona and how valuable they are to a digital marketing strategy . Thanks a lot for the amazing insight
ReplyDeleteThis is really helpful. I am in the process of developing out personas for my own business and this highlights a great starting point. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteThis is really helpful. I am in the process of developing out personas for my own business and this highlights a great starting point. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete