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An introduction: what are marketing personas of your business?

A persona is a conceptual character that represents and communicates attributes that represents a distinct set of people within a target market. It’s based on both qualitative and quantitative data. They are also referred to as buyer personas, or decision makers.

This is not about identifying demographics, it is about determining why people buy and make decisions. The focus is on the drivers.

The thinking behind the 'persona', originated in the book by software designer and programmer Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. The premise was that developers needed to design software for end users. Personas developed within organisations are a means for each department to share understanding about their user groups and develop an overall experience able to meet their particular needs.

In a marketing concept, this means of course:

  1. Designing an interaction or experience with an end user in mind
  2. Tailoring marketing and social engagement campaigns and strategies to specific groups or personas


How does developing marketing personas help business?

A number of benefits stem from researching, developing and targeting persona groups, including:

By understanding your market you can personalise messages to get better results.

What are you looking for?

The level of detail that you can go into when developing your persona groups is immense. It can be as simple as segmenting by industry, role and salary, or it can expand even further into median income, marital status, academic levels, personality types, goals and frustrations.

Again, you are looking for psychological, material and behavioural drivers that impact the way they think and make decisions.

Time to get inside the mind of your customer.

Steps to discover key marketing personas

 Try to limit the types of personas you work with to 2 to 3 and determine whether you wanted to focus on personas for particular products, services or for your brand as a whole. Focusing on those key groups that are higher yield is likely to achieve higher profits.

This is about determining the nuances and drivers for key target groups. It’s meaningful data that you are looking for and qualitative often holds more weight than the quantitative.

  1. Research
  1. Analyse the data
  1. Modelisation
  1. Optimisation

It’s really not that difficult…

While the background research involved to develop the specifics of your marketing persona groups does take time, expertise and focus, the return on investment will help you to design campaigns that are increasingly successful. Identifying and developing personas helps you to understand who your audience is, can guide you to develop content and messages that resonate with your audience and ultimately positions your product or brand as the authentic solution to their real needs.

If you’d like to discuss how a persona-oriented campaign might look like for your business, we’d love to help. Email info@mih.com.au or call 02 8249 1817.

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