How audience personas can help your marketing

All good marketing strategies involve target audience personas. These figurative figures work wonders for your marketing.

Creating personas helps you to hone in on who exactly needs your product or service and how you can tell them about it in a way that they will notice or care about. But these figures can’t be plucked from the air and involve a ton of research before you decide that John, aged 52, is your man.

Figuring out your target market

First off, you need to know who exactly your target market is. This can be done in a number of ways, and using your whole team or office to help brainstorm can be really beneficial.

For a more concrete idea, you may want to send out customer surveys via email to gather some data about your existing clients. Or you could use any existing data you have gathered, via your social media channels, website analytics, or trends in your contacts list.

Whittle this market into personas

When you have a solid idea of who your target audience are, you can begin to create the imaginary people to target your marketing efforts towards.

It’s best to have a couple, perhaps three or four, to showcase the full range of potential clients. You’ll need to include the age, gender, education and job role for your ideal customers. The more information you can create around a person, the better.

However, also make sure to include some psychographic data when developing personas. This will cover things like values, interests, pain points and anxieties which will really help you to get under the skin of your target customers. Having an idea about what needs or wants might cause different types of people to want to engage with your product or service can make all the difference. Vice versa with what anxieties might cause them to pause before a purchase.

While you're thinking about this, it might also be a good idea to consider who your "negative" buyer personas might be. These are the people you would ideally not attract towards your business. Some common examples could be those who would be unable to make a purchase in your price range or students seeking knowledge for the sake of research rather than as part of a buyer's journey.

Specific advertising

Once you know the troubles your target market are facing or experiencing, you can better understand how to address these issues with your advertising strategy.

If, perhaps, you find your target market struggle to understand complex jargon, you can simplify your marketing strategy right down and speak in a straightforward way.

You might find that one of the groups of people you would like to market towards tend towards needing data proving a product's worth before buying. To work with this, you might adapt your content plan to provide this data and make it easily accessible on your website.

By creating audience personas, you can focus your marketing efforts and change the tone of voice and imagery to better show your target market what your company are capable of.

Choosing and Adapting Channels

You can use buyer personas both to select new marketing channels which will bring value to your business, and to tailor the ones you have to optimise ROI.

Using your target demographics, you can often make an estimate about which social platforms your target buyers are likely to use and how, which can show you where you need to be and the kind of content you should offer there.

You might also be able to surmise what format your target market prefer for content (video? Detailed blog posts? A podcast on their commute?), the level of formality they prefer in emails, or the wording they might use in searches. All of this can be extremely valuable for your marketing strategy.

Now, what?

You may be surprised by the results of your audience personas and these are likely to change and grow as your company does. But once you understand what your market need, you can continue to alter your marketing plan and content until it matches their needs effectively.

Concrete audience personas can be used in all manners of marketing, such as SEO, social advertising and PPC - all channels which we help businesses with every day! Book a chat with our team to find out what we can do for your company.

Updated October 2021