Marketing Personas: Hi, My Name Is ______

How many marketing messages have you seen today? If you’re a business person, well… then you probably also fit into one of many different types of marketing personas. So we’re going to guess it’s a lot.

Having trouble quantifying? 100? 500?

More like 5,000.

Yes, that is the average number of marketing messages we are exposed to on a daily basis. It’s so many messages that many don’t even make an impact.

As a marketer, you need to cut through the clutter and shake your target customers out of their daze. Since you can’t literally shake your customers to get their attention, I’m going to use this blog to talk about marketing personas.

Tell Me More About Marketing Personas

In a nutshell, a marketing persona is a fictional character that represents key characteristics and behaviors of a group of customers. Each persona is created from a mixture of demographic data and your understanding of their values, concerns, and motivations.

Why Create Marketing Personas?

If your customers feel like your messaging is speaking to their motivations and needs, they are more likely to remember you out of the other 4,999 messages they’ve seen that day.

In digital marketing, we create marketing personas to build strategies that enhance each groups path along the purchase journey and optimize campaign performance.

How to Create

Now that you better understand the benefits of a marketing persona, let’s get started.

1. Data

Gather up all of your customer demographic data and user website analytics. There is a wealth of valuable information in there including:

• Demographics
• Keywords – Check out the terms customers are using to get to your website. This could give you insights on their motivations and concerns.
• Site Usage – How long is the average time from site entrance to purchase? Do your customers visit a lot of pages before making a decision or do they know what they want right away?

2. Surveys and Interviews

These are two great tools that can really give detailed insights about your customers. Asking the right questions can give you a clearer picture of how people perceive your brand and that they really value.

Don’t forget to interview your sales team and customer service representatives, too. They are on the frontlines having important interactions and conversations.

3. Listen to the Chatter

People share a lot on social media – good experiences, the not-so-good experiences, and everything
in-between.

Listen for customer feedback on your brand specifically and dig a little deeper for people with problems that your product or service can solve.

Marketing Persona Template

Now we’ll finally get to the fun part – naming and defining individual marketing personas.

I’d like to introduce you to Jim and Pam. Target personas for our email automation software platform.

Jim

Demographics

• Gender: Male
• Age: 38
• Education: MBA & CPA
• Awards: Multiple Dundies
• Occupation: Accountant
• Company: Jim’s Accounting Services, LLC
• Family: Serious Girlfriend
• Location: Philadelphia, PA

Motivations:
Wants to grow his client base and needs a better way to stay top of mind with his potential customers.

Within 2 years, Jim wants to add two accountants to his firm.

Concerns:
Understands the importance of email marketing, but needs something user-friendly and not overly complicated to set up – email marketing software is not his forte.

Words from Jim:
“I need a software that is fast, simple, and easy.”

Sample Marketing Message for Jim:
Drive Business with Email Marketing – Quickly & Easily

Pam

Demographics

• Gender: Female
• Age: 31
• Education: Bachelor’s
• Accolades: Never hit a woman with her car
• Occupation: Marketing Manager, Assistant to the
• Company: Tasty Bake Shoppe
• Family: Single (formerly engaged)
• Location: Stamford, CT

Motivations:
Looking to reduce her time spent writing and sending email marketing messages.

Wants to create a marketing drip campaign to re-engage past customers.

Concerns:
Limited experience with launching and measuring email drip campaigns.

Words from Pam:
“My perfect email platform will be equipped with automation templates and good customer support. It will have the functionality and durability of a Prism DuroSport.”

Sample Marketing Message for Pam:
Take the Guesswork Out of Email Marketing Automation

Using & Optimizing Your Marketing Personas

Once you’ve completed profiles for your personas, share them with the entire team and start working to create messaging that speaks to the more defined motivations of your targeted customers.

It’s imperative to track the performance of all marketing messages and make adjustments to Jim and Pam, as needed.

Marketing personas are not an exact science. (Much more like mad science and you usually want it to explode.)

It’s better to think of them as a tool to visualize your target customers and measure the reaction of messaging.

Are marketing personas working for your business? I’d love to talk results, messaging, and digital marketing with you. Send me a message here.