In order to understand what your target audience wants, you need to at least build one user persona. This step is crucial to developing a successful online marketing strategy and growing your brand’s presence.
What Is a Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is a specific generalization of who you want to target for your company’s products or services. An accurate user persona will help your digital marketing team identify what your target audience wants. It is also crucial for customizing user experience to satisfy your customers.
Creating personas is something that your digital marketing team should be focusing on before implementing any kind of online marketing strategy. Persona development should be based on a deep, thorough understanding of who wants to buy your products or use your services. These personas should have a heavy influence on customer acquisition and retention as well as product development, content creation and follow-ups on sales.
How to Create a Persona
When thinking about how to make a persona, you should consider a number of variables. Start by gathering data and organizing the information into segmented groups. This will help you determine who your ideal customer base is and how to market specifically to them.
Steps on how to create a user persona:
1. Make a list – Before you dive in and begin crafting user personas, you should first sit down and consider all the aspects of your clientele. Create a list of all the factors that come to mind. This goes far beyond age, gender and location. You should also consider aspects such as their:
- Education
- Occupation
- Income
- Relationship Status
- Household
- Native Language
- Interests/Hobbies
- Pain Points
- Motivations to Buy
- Commonly Asked Questions
2. Listen – Whether your company is 10 years old or brand new, you need to listen carefully to what people are saying about your brand. For newer businesses, making a good first impression is crucial in developing brand trust and developing loyal customers.
Check out social media posts that mention your brand. Are they excited about what your company has to offer? If not, this can help you identify pain points early on and incorporate them into your user persona.
3. Edit the list – As you dive deeper into what is a persona and persona development, you should narrow your defining factors down to the most crucial aspects. Going back to what is a persona ─ it’s a specific generalization of the ideal customer. That means that while you are generalizing, you should also pinpoint the most accurate details.
Age, for example, is one of the key points that needs to be specified. An 18-year-old will most likely not want the same skincare products as a 55-year old.
4. User surveys – If you are having difficulty gathering data about your customers from your website, you can always opt for a traditional survey. People enjoy talking about themselves. They enjoy it even more if they get something out of it.
Send out a survey to your email list and offer a discount as an incentive. This will get your customers excited to tell you about themselves, and you can use this information to craft the perfect user persona.
When working on persona development, don’t forget that these aren’t just statistics. Your data directly reflects the lives and buying behaviors of real people.
SharpSpring, Inc. is a full marketing automation company that can provide your business with the tools it needs to craft the perfect user persona. For more information or to request a demo, visit our website today.
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