As a modern digital marketer, you’re well aware of the latest trends and techniques that would help you to escalate your business and convert successfully. You’re a pro-active business owner who is always on the lookout for effective customer-centric tools to satisfy your audience. You have found many till now, but what if I introduce to you something called ‘Persona Marketing’, what will your reaction be?

Owing to the changing demands and requirements of customers today, it has become crucial for every marketer to try and find out effective ways to win over more and more consumers over time. Hence, creating personas and devoting time to persona marketing is considered to be a giant leap in marketing history.

This blog post is targeted at what a buyer persona is and how you can create one for dramatic business success.

First, let us understand what persona marketing is?

Persona marketing or persona-based marketing is a popular technique used by businesses to analyze and put together their crucial buyer profiles. This technique allows marketers to better relate to their primary customers. With well planned, persona-based marketing organizations can roughly sketch out the following-

• Who the buyers are?
• How to connect and communicate with them?
• What they think about the products?
• How would they like to purchase?

But before we plunge into more details, let’s take a look into the term ‘PERSONA.’ What does it actually mean-

How do we define Persona?

Persona is a fictional character created by organizations based upon their research in order to represent different user types who might use the service, product, site of the brand. The targeted group is likely to have similar choices and is sure to respond alike.

Creating personas is highly beneficial for business as they let the marketers understand their users’ experiences, behavior as well as goals. Moreover, persona marketing makes a marketer’s task simple as the approach guides them throughout the ideation process and helps them generate a memorable user experience for the target group.

In other words, personas are not real people but are composed of people based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Personas mainly add the human touch, and when you create persona profiles of typical or atypical users, it further facilitates comprehending patterns in your research.

Moreover, this process with the types of people you seek to create your product for. Personas are also identified as model characters or composite characters.

How To Create a User or Buyer Persona

Before planning a marketing persona, you need to understand that personas come in different styles and sizes- similar to the actual customers. And what to include in your persona? The answer is simple -whatever suits your company.

For example, if you’re a tech company and you have planned to create a marketing persona, why don’t you include details like their skill level with devices?

On the contrary, if you are a company producing kids’ products, don’t forget to keep up with children’s trends. Here naturally, tech skill is not at all relevant.

This means certain specifics are standard for every industry and provide the strength of your persona’s character. Using those universal features, you can bring your persona to life; simply speaking, these particulars help you better visualize your personas.

Research Users In Details
The initial step is to gather data primarily through User Interview. Discover and click your most important insights and customer problems. One of the most important criteria of a Persona should reflect business goals and the needs of users and business.

Identify Users’ Patterns
Once you have your data handy, analyze them and identify patterns. Now it’s time to take a closer look at your data and see whether there are any overlapping ideas or not.

Finally, Create a Persona
The final step is to create a persona defining the following:

• Add a real name of the persona
• Create a photo of the person
• Introduce a personal quote
• Add a bio of the person
• Identify demographics – age, sex, income, location
• Imagine and create personality traits

Benefits of a Well-Defined Marketing Persona and how to Leverage them!

1. User Persona Helps Figuring Out Customers’ Needs & Interests:

A buyer persona is advantageous for every marketer because it helps him figure out the customers’ exact needs and interests. With an image formed in mind, it becomes easier for every entrepreneur to design products and services according to his/her needs. Creating a persona, you can easily visualize them in your head while you plan for a product or service.

When you come face to face with your customers’ problems, you can easily plan up ideas and find out how to cater to their needs.

2. Persona Marketing Gives Insight On Where Customers Spend Time:

Creating a user persona helps you to gain a better understanding of where your customers spend most of their time. When they are online, which social network they typically rely on to connect with their friends and acquaintances.

The moment you get to know which channels your customers visit, you can better target your promote them in the right place. For example, based on the research, you have identified one of your personas spends more time on Facebook, while the other one prefers communication through emails. This way, you can reach your prospects and impress them.

3. You Can Generate Better Quality Leads

Once you have identified who your customers are, what their interests are, and where you can reach them, you proceed towards a more systematic process. This means you will be able to perfectly cater your marketing to the right people in the right places and generate better quality leads.

You can use the information regarding your prospects to establish a personal connection and convey your messages in a more personalized way. You can build better lead nurturing programs targeted at different personas and thereby improve lead quality for your company. It means you get better customers.

4. Improved Closed-Loop Analytics:

Closed-loop analytics or closed-loop marketing is one of the essential features to have a thriving business. With persona marketing, closed-loop analytics becomes better. Through detailed research, you know which persona will lead to your most ideal customer and this gives you scope to identify which leads your marketing team and sales team should be spending the most time with.

The approach proves to be beneficial as closed-loop marketing analytics lets you identify which of the different marketing personas would make better customers. Eventually, you can allocate your time and money efficaciously to the right channels that are sure to attract better customers. You can thus acquire more customers in lesser time and retain them for the long term.

5. Persona Marketing Contributes To A Better Company Alignment

In addition to all of the above, the most significant advantage of using Persona-based marketing is that, it contributes to a better company alignment. This means your marketing team can assess the customer segmentation in a more lucrative way and create profitable program strategies. Furthermore, the marketing persona aligns your sales process and communicates with prospects on a more meaningful level.

Needless to say, this approach improves the quality and quantity of conversations with your customers.

Wrapping Up!

If we take a closer look, user persona has a bright future. When marketers and sales strategists attempt to respond to the real problems of their target audience, the returns are greater. This approach is predominantly based on qualitative and quantitative information about your prospects that your sales team gathers. They are the medium between your consumers and your brand. Hence, it is of utmost significance to train the team with advanced technologies that gather the most user data.

Because based on that data, your sales strategist would form the user persona. In our opinion, your marketing, sales and customer service teams must be aligned and work in perfect tandem. This approach could get you helpful insights about each of your customers. And eventually, the data could be included while creating personas.

Persona marketing is sure to bring in massive changes in the business and drive practical strategies on the table. Take note of the above and create your own persona to keep on attracting and retaining your customers.

If you are looking to optimize your sales pipeline and keeping your creative cogwheel running, then visit us to know how and why you can have a compelling user persona. We can help you develop an authentic user/buyer persona and offer custom solutions to satisfy your clients and increase your sales parallelly.