What is a Marketing Persona?
A marketing persona is a specific profile of someone who may fall under your target market. These personas can highlight specific information including demographic information (gender, age, ethnicity, education, income, location, marital status, etc.), personality characteristics, values, wants and needs, likes and dislikes, hobbies, and more. Ultimately, a marketing persona embodies the ideal target customer [1]. When your persona is created, you can use it to begin more effectively target customers most likely to be interested and purchase your offering.
Why Are Marketing Persona’s Important?
Marketing personas are important because they essentially “the foundation for building your marketing house” [2]. Understanding these personas is essential, as they affect nearly all marketing operations, including how to effectively reach these audiences, how to create content that is most interesting to them, the type of speech and working you use in your marketing content, and more.
Email personas are particularly important for email marketing, as you want to design your promotional emails in a way that is most enticing to your target market, increasing the likelihood that conversions will occur. In order to understand how to build your emails, you must know what elements and verbiage you need to include to make them as effective as possible. Email marketing is essential to building your brand and keeping strong connections with your customers, thus it is important to spend the time to build a strong persona. According to one source, personalized emails are essential to increasing the conversion rate, as “a personalized email message can increase your click-through rates by 14%, and it can increase your conversion rate by 10%” [3]. Having a solid buyer persona will allow for this level of personalization.
How to Create a Persona
There are four steps to creating these target personas, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, drafting the persona, socializing the persona [2].
Quantitative Analysis:
When starting the persona creation process, you should start by gathering quantitative information at both the company and individual level, such as the number of customers by industry [2]. By gathering information about all potential customers, you can start to understand what type of personas these potential customers embody.
Qualitative Analysis:
This is the next step of better understanding your target market. According to one guide, a good way to do this is by reaching out to these potential customers and conducting an interview [2]. After gathering important information, write up a summary that gathers all of the information you learned into one place, allowing you to identify crucial trends [2]. Another benefit of compiling all of the information into one place is that you can begin segmenting the information, allowing you to create different customer segments who will have different buyer personas [2].
Draft the Persona:
Once you have gathered enough information to deeply understand your target customers, you can begin drafting the persona. To do this, you want to compile information that will allow marketers to effectively build marketing content off of them, such as who they are, why they are a good customer to target (the benefits of convincing them to convert), what influences their purchasing behaviors, and how they typically go about purchasing offerings [2].
Socializing the Personas:
Once the buyer persona is made, it is essential that your company understands it. While buyer personas are particularly important for marketers, it is also useful for the entire firm to have an understanding of the people they may be serving. Socializing the persona can be done differently depending on the firm, but a popular way to do it is through a presentation [2]. Additionally, it can be useful for employees of your company to meet and talk with these employees to get an even better understanding [2].
Sources
[1] https://www.simplifie.com/marketing-blog/what-are-marketing-personas-and-how-will-they-help-you
[2] https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide/
