You likely don’t have to start from scratch. If your business has been running for a while, you most probably already have a good sense of your target audience. What might be helpful is to write it down so that you can share it with the team or use it for your future reference.
Step-by-step guide to filling out a marketing persona template
Now that you know where you’re headed with a marketing persona, the next step is to actually build out the profile.
Let’s take a look at each field and talk about how we filled it out.
- Give the persona a name.
The name can be whatever you choose. Make it a real name so the persona feels like a real person.
A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona’s view and see your products and services from her perspective. A persona can function almost like another person in the room when making a decision—It is “Sally.” She looks at what you’re doing from her particular and very specific vantage point, and points out flaws and benefits for her.
- Identify the persona’s job, role, and company.
Your greatest resource for coming up with jobs for your personas is likely to be customer surveys. When you are building the surveys, you can include a field for job title, company size, and type of business. For instance, a recent survey of Buffer users showed that a large percentage are small-business owners—founders, owner/operators, or one-man teams. These can all fit nicely into a single persona.
- Discover demographic information.
For demographic information, you can glean some insight from Google Analytics, plus your best-educated guesses and survey info. Drilling down into the Google Analytics stats can show you where your visitors live as well as age, gender, affinity, and technology. Navigate to the Audience section of your Google Analytics to see all this and more:
- Goals and challenges, values and fears
Actual customer interviews will be helpful in determining the objectives here. During your interviews to get a good feeling for your customers’ goals and challenges.
- What’s important to them and what’s driving the change?
- What’s impeding or speeding their need to change?
- How do they go about change?
- What do they need to know to embrace change?
- Who do they turn to for advice or information?
- What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?
- Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
- What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?
While coming up with these goals and challenges, you can also identify the ways in which you can help customers meet these goals and overcome the challenges.
- Marketing message and elevator pitch
This part is all up to you! Put your knowledge and information to use and determine the best ways to meet the needs of each type of customer. At this step, “message” refers to how you might describe your product for this particular type of person. Are you a complete social media service? An enterprise customer management tool? Then your elevator pitch can go into detail and set a consistent message on how to sell to this customer.
Takeaways
Marketing personas will help you identify with your audience and better solve their problems. And when you solve their problems, everyone wins.