The Step-by-Step Guide To Building Your Marketing Personas

I am writing this post to recent graduates Jamie and Sarah who are moving into their professional life and want to learn more about online marketing world.  I am also writing this post to Michael and Lindsay, business owners who are looking to boost their content strategy and get actual results and leads. These names have come from a process of creating marketing personas.

Jamie and Sarah and Michael and Lindsay are characters made up of a mix of informed guesses and raw information, signifying portions of the audience that visit our site here at sixfive.co.  Jamie could be you, and Lindsay might be your new boss. I do this because when I put a name, face, and characteristics to my audience, our team can deliver even better content for them.

The same holds for revenue and promotion. Creating personas for your market and audience will help enhance how you solve the problems of your customers. Doing this task may seem silly and pointless, but the process alone brings wonderful insights and empathy into your customers and their problems. This is our beginner’s guide to getting you started with your marketing personas.

There are many templates already out there to help you with this task.  We really like the Hubspot Templates. A marketing persona is a sketch of a crucial section of your market. For content marketing purposes, you want to use this to identify people that you can tailor your content to.  This will make your customers find your articles helpful and applicable.

How many of these marketing personas do you have to produce? We recommend that you make three to five personas to represent your market; this amount is large enough to cover nearly all your customers yet small enough to be specific to each niche.

Many of these templates have the same information. They will all help you better connect with your customers and understand what they value. Here is a quick review on which you need to include in your marketing personas:

Title of the Persona

Pick a name. Hopefully this is an easy start! Here is an example of a full template below:

Job title

• Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
• Details about their role

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Salary / household income
• Location: urban / suburban / rural
• Education
• Family

Goals and challenges

• Primary goal
• Secondary goal
• How you help achieve these goals
• Primary challenge
• Secondary challenge
• How you help solve these problems

Values / fears

• Primary values
• Common objections during sales process

Note: If a few of those aren’t very clear, don’t worry.  We will go over everything.

In-Depth marketing persona characteristics unique for your customers

Beyond the basic principles, you’ll discover that special info might be needed for your particular company. Marketing personas may differ in different businesses and industries. A food provider would need consumer info that is unique when compared to a software company.  A persona for a sales funnel will also be altered for blogs or email marketing.

With that in your mind, below are some various kinds of information which you could consider including to your own characters.

• Actual quotations from interviews with customers
• Computer literacy
• Hobbies
• Where they get their news
• Sites they read

Where do we get the information to make a marketing persona?

I’ve given you lots to do. To the point, it may be a bit overwhelming.  So, where do you start? There are lots of resources to get you going, from the details found in your website data to genuine dialogue with real-life customers.

Here are three areas to start:

1. Social Media Research

You can find powerful insights from your social media. Use your current network to locate your prospective customers and get them engaged with questions and content and listen to their problems and concerns.  Facebook and LinkedIn are fantastic strategies for this.

2. Website Analytics

Within your website statistics (here at SixFive.co, we recommend Google Analytics & Jetpack to start), it is possible to observe where your visitors originated from, what keywords they used to locate you, and once they came, the length of time they invested on your site. This information is essential for creating a strong marketing persona.

3. Your Own Team

Get the staff collectively— customer support, marketing, sales, and more.  Any member of your team who has relationships with customers needs to be involved in discussing their view about what makes your customers mark.

Let’s Go Through It

Now that you understand why we are doing this, let’s move through the exercise to greatly help us locate and understand our core clients.

Provide a name to the personality.

The name can be whatever you want, but we want your choice to have a personality and feel real.  An identity needs to have enough emotional depth that it allows you find out your services and goods from their viewpoint.

Recognize the persona’s job, function, and organization.

Customer studies will be crucial for developing your personas.  Use customer surveys to find out these characteristics of your marketing persona. Another strategy for this would be a tool like Survey Monkey.

Discover and use demographic information

For demographic info, it is possible to obtain some understanding from Google-Analytics, as well as your best knowledgeable guesses and study data.

At this stage, you might be questioning if any of this information is truly crucial. It may look like filler, but a vital function is served by doing this.  It helps you use empathy to understand your customers.  This helps you create a deep understanding of the life of your customers which will help you greatly in creating a better product or service and business.  What are their fears? What are their challenges? What are their values? Here are some great questions below to get you thinking:

• What ’s accelerating or slowing down their change?
• How do they go through change?
• What do they really need to know to adopt change?
• Who do they use to for tips or guidance?
• What could cause this change to lose necessity?

Your instinct here may be useful. Make an effort to place yourself in the sneakers of your client and strategize with sympathy. Consider what typical objections keep you from selling to them? Then discuss ways it is possible to help.

Your Turn

As mentioned, every company is going to be different.  But, done right, marketing personas will allow you to better identify your customer’s issues and determine a solution. When their difficulties are solved by you, everybody wins.

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