Developing Personas for your Target Audience

Developing Personas

 

Do you really know your target audiences?  Do you know their demographic profile? Does this tell you anything about their motivations and buying patterns? Developing personas could help you reach your target audiences by targeting them with more relevant and effective content.

So, who is your target audience?  What are their needs, motivations and requirements?  From where do they get their information? What media content do they consume?  What blogs, newspapers and publications do they read? Do they download podcasts? Subscribe to newsletters?  What search engines do they use, what websites do they visit? What groups or forums do they follow? Who are their major influencers?  Who do they trust?

These are all the questions you need to ask in order to develop personas.  Buyer personas are not target markets and they are not industry specific because it doesn’t matter what the industry or sector you are in, particular personas will all have the same issues.  So we focus on the general things they have in common. What are they trying to achieve?  What are their universal goals, wishes and dreams?  And with all this information we define common behaviour patterns and we map them on a ‘need state’ axis so you can target them with relevant and effective content by going to where they are engaging in order to reach them.

An example of a familiar persona is Always on Annie.

 

Always on Annie

 

Juggling work, motherhood, marriage, a house, thirty something Annie is ‘Always On’, digitally online but also available to her family using digital marketing to advantage her family as well as her career.  Annie travels for business regularly so spends a lot of time in hotels and airports on her iPad.  She does not use Facebook as much as previously, but uses LinkedIn to connect with work and professional colleagues.  She rarely tweets, doesn’t have time.