How to Develop Persona for your Target Audience
The most fruitful way to make your marketing effective and boost your business is to target the right persona of your audience, instead of a group of random people. No matter, if you are looking to start a new marketing campaign, playing with an existing one, or even if you are trying to find out what went wrong with any of your old campaigns, the right point to start from is your target audience.
To achieve better results with your marketing strategies, you need to fine-tune this target. The best way to do this is to create a persona. In this article, I will discuss how to develop a persona for your target audience.
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What is a Persona?
A persona is an outline of a typical member of your target audience. They are semi-fictional characters that you create when you have a thorough knowledge of the behavior and habits of your audience. In short, personas add real richness to your target.
If you want more information on how a persona can help you in your business, please read this.
How to Develop a Persona?
Now I will share the four simple steps to help to develop a person of your audience. These steps are:
Draw an Outline of your Target Audience Persona:
The first step in the journey of developing a great persona of your target audience is to answer the following questions:
What is the gender of the typical member of your target audience? Is he a male or a female?
What is the age of that person?
What is his or her marital status? Does he or she have a family?
What is the location of that person?
What is the source of income of that person?
In which industry does this typical person works?
Depending on your industry, what is it that this person like to do?
If you study your audience thoroughly, you can answer these questions easily.
For instance: This is Mr. Aric Simon. He is a male, aged between 35 and 45. He is married with two young children, and he works in a tech company as a senior manager.
Go a Little Deeper:
Now when you have an outline of your persona, is the time to go a little deeper. To move forward, you have to answer the following questions:
What is the main pain point of that person?
What are the challenges that particular person has to face in his job?
Is he a decision maker? Or does he need the approval from his upper management?
Let’s talk about Mr. Simon. He finds it hard to develop training material for his staff that can help them in learning new technologies. He is not the decision maker of his company, and thus, he finds it hard to create and then gets his training material approved by the higher management.
Figure out how your Perfect PersonaAccess the Marketplace:
After getting enough knowledge about the personal life of your persona, it’s time to figure out how your targets access the marketplace. To find this, you have to find answers to the following questions:
Which device does your target persona use to access the marketplace? Is it a mobile device, a laptop, or a desktop?
When does your persona access the marketplace? During office hours? Or after office?
Does your target persona use social media? If yes, which platform does he use the most? What content does he like to read, comment on, and share?
Who does your persona think is the real influencer?
What triggers them to make a purchase?
If we talk about Mr. Simon, he mostly uses his laptop to access the internet and the marketplace, during office hours. He has maintained profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. He likes to read news about technologies, and the latest inventions. He has joined different groups on social media, where he has met few influencers. Mostly, he doesn’t buy anything unless he is fully convinced that it can make his life easier.
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Put all the Above three Points Together:
Now when you have a complete and clear picture of your persona, you need to put all the things together. From all this information, you will be able to plan an effective marketing strategy to convince your persona to buy your product. It will also help you to know which marketing channels could help you to get more sales.
With the passage of time, your target audience could change, and so would your persona. It is important to keep revising your target persona after some time.
If you want help in developing your persona, you can download persona templates from here.
Adil Rasheed
Professional Content Writer
Social Scene
BeSocialScene.com