What is a marketing persona?
A marketing persona is a detailed description of a person who represents your target audience. This marketing persona is fictional but based on thorough research of your existing or desired audience.
It is also called a buyer persona or persona for short.
You can't get to know each customer or prospect individually. But you can create a marketing persona to represent your set of customers based on common characteristics.
Let's break that down a bit:
Precise but generic representation
A marketing persona is not supposed to detail a particular person and should never be based on a specific individual.
Rather, it is a robotic portrait that should reflect the majority of the people it is supposed to represent.
Key segment of your audience
A marketing persona is supposed to represent a segment of your target market, not all of it.
If your target market consists of “marketers,” it's perfectly acceptable to have multiple marketing personas for different types of marketers, as long as the difference between them is enough to warrant a separate persona.
You can have multiple marketing personas for marketers, broken down by business size, industry, or whatever makes the most sense for your business.
Do not take into account that the buyer
It can also be interesting to look beyond the traditional buyer when creating your personas.
Here are a few other marketing personas that I've developed and used in a variety of ways that you might want to consider:
Detractors
Detractors are the other people in the buying cycle who can potentially derail the sale, even if your main marketing persona is in favor of it.
This phenomenon is particularly common in complex B2B sales, with longer sales cycles and multiple people involved.
Influencers
Influencers are people who, even if they don't buy the product directly, influence the actual buyer so significantly and on such a scale that it's worth investing time in these people.
A good example is accountants who tell small business owners what accounting software to use, or website designers who tell their customers which CMS to use.
Anti-persona (= negative persona)
An anti-persona, also known as a negative persona, is the exact opposite of a marketing persona.
This is a fictional character that represents a set of people who are not your target customers.
To understand, creating an anti-persona doesn't mean you're going to actively prevent these people from using your product or service, just that you're not going to focus your marketing efforts on acquiring these people.
Here are a few scenarios in which it makes sense to have an anti-persona:
Prices > Budget
The first reason you might want to create anti-personas is because there's a particular customer who you know simply can't afford to buy your product or service.
If you sell software for $1,000 per month, it's very unlikely that a small business owner can afford it (unless it's a critical mission).
Therefore, by creating an anti-persona for this particular person, you could understand how not to waste your efforts attracting people who can never afford your product.
Positioning
Sometimes not addressing a particular type of customer is also a competitive positioning or differentiation tactic.
4 steps to create marketing personas
Now that you've understood what the different types of marketing personas you can create are, it's time to start creating them.
Having done it several times, I've found that there are generally four steps:
- Quantitative analysis
- Qualitative analysis
- Writing the marketing persona
- Personality socialization
Let's look at them in more detail.
Step 1: Quantitative Analysis
If you have a horizontal product or service that is not exclusively used by a market segment (for example, Buffer is used by people from different business sectors, different professional roles, etc.), it is a critical step in understanding what your main customer segments are.
On the other hand, if you have a specialized product, like an order management application for surfboard creators, you probably already know who your target segments (surfboard creators) are, and this step may not be as important.
In any event, here are the steps I took to conduct a quantitative analysis and find out who our target segments are:
- Collect a list of customers
- Analyze the list at the company level
- Analyze the list at the individual level
Here is more information about each stage.
1. Collect a list of customers
Start by making a list of all paying customers, with as much information about each as possible.
The information you include will depend on a variety of different factors, including the industries you serve, your sales process, and more.
To help you come up with ideas, here are a few dimensions that I've found useful in the past:
Demographic information
This is basic demographic information about the business, including the following:
- Company name
- Industry
- Business income
- Number of employees
- Countries
- Town
Revenue Information
This includes information about how much revenue you get from each customer, including things like:
- Annual contract value
- Total lifetime value
- Average spend per transaction
Information about the commitment
This includes information on the degree of consumer engagement with your product or service:
- Number of connections per month
- Number of users using the product
- Number of documents created, messages sent on social media, etc. (i.e. everything your product actually does).
2. Analyze the list globally
Once you've come up with a list of customers with the characteristics you've chosen, it's time to start analyzing that list and looking for trends.
My favorite tool for that is Tableau, because you only need to drop your customers' Excel sheet onto it to create an astonishing array of charts and graphs by simply dragging and dropping.
Here are a few analyses that I've found useful in the past:
- Number of customers by sector of activity
- Average revenue by industry
- Number of customers by employee size
- Number of customers per country
- Average income by employee size
What you're trying to do here is find trends that give you insight into your best customer segments.
For example, during a quantitative analysis at a previous company, I broke down our customers by income bracket (that is, how much they paid us) and discovered that while 83% of our customers paid us between 0 and 100 euros per month, these 84% of customers represented only 34% of our revenue.
On the other hand, the segment that paid us between 100 and 1000 euros per month represented only 13% of our customers but accounted for almost half of our income.
Based on this information, we started to look more closely at the identity of these “sweet spot” customers (i.e. those who pay us between 100 and 1000 euros per month) and found that they mainly came from a few key sectors:
Based on this information, we started to target the construction, food, beverage, and manufacturing sectors as key segments (professional services, while important on the chart above, are in fact a mixture of lawyers, accountants, public relations firms, etc. that, when divided into each sector, do not represent a significant volume).
3. Analyze the list individually
Now that you know what your best customer segments of your business are (that is, construction companies with 100 to 1000 employees), it is time to determine what is the ideal customer segment at the individual level (that is, who you should target within these businesses).
The process to follow is largely the same as above. Gather a list of all customers in your industry of choice (that is, construction companies with 100 to 1000 employees), and then include information about the primary purchaser/user of your product in that list.
This may include information like:
- Job title
- Department
- Genre
- Seniority (VP, Manager, etc.)
Once you've gathered all of these elements, load them into your analysis tool of choice and start building graphs and charts to see what you can learn.
Continuing with the example above, we found that within construction companies, it was mainly the project manager who used and bought the product, so it became our marketing persona.
Step 2: Qualitative analysis
Now that you have a good understanding of your target segments, both at a business level and at an individual level, it's time to start learning more about these people.
In my opinion, the most effective way to do this is the good old-fashioned customer interview.
Here is the process that I generally follow:
Action 1: Awareness-raising
The first step is to set up interviews (by phone or in person if you can) with your existing customers.
To do this, I typically gather the names and email addresses of everyone I want to contact into a spreadsheet and upload it to a CRM/sales automation tool, which can help you send a series of emails to each of these customers and organize your efforts based on who responds or who needs additional follow-up.
Here's a template for a series of emails I've sent in the past:
Email no. 1
Hello Didier
How are you doing?
My name is Aaron Beashel and I am the [position] of [company name].
I am contacting you because I would like to know more about how you use our product, what benefits you get from it, what you used to use, etc. My goal is to get this information back to our marketing, product, and support teams so that we can improve [Product Name] for you.
Would you be willing to talk to me for 30 minutes on the phone and tell me a bit more about how you use [Product Name]? If that's the case, simply click here to choose a time that works best for you, or you can reply to this email and we'll set up an appointment.
Looking forward to talking to you, John!
aaron
Email #2 - Sent 3 days after the initial email
Hello Didier
Just wanted to follow up on my previous email and see if you had 30 minutes to tell me how you use [Product Name]
As I mentioned, the aim is to learn how customers like you use the product so that we can improve it for you.
If you're ready to have a quick chat, simply click here to choose a time that works best for you and I'll call you at that time.
Looking forward to talking to you, John!
aaron
Email #3 - Sent 6 days after the initial email
Hey John
I know you're very busy, so I just wanted to send you a final email to see if you had 30 minutes to tell me about your use of [Product Name]?
If that's the case, simply click here to select a time that's convenient for you and I'll call you at that time.
If you don't have time, that's okay either. I really appreciate you using [Product Name] and hope that everything is going well for you. If there's anything we can do to help, feel free to contact our support team at [support email].
Good luck!
aaron
As you can see, these emails contain links to a page where people can book a time that is convenient for them. I generally use Calendly for that.
The reason it's important to include these links is because it saves you the hassle of exchanging 10 emails with each customer trying to coordinate schedules, which is a huge time saver for everyone. I've also found that it increases the number of interviews you actually get (because it's easier for people to book them).
Action 2: Conduct the interview
Once you've gotten interviews, it's time to pick up the phone and learn from your customers.
After conducting over a hundred of these interviews, I developed a kind of model of questions to ask and included my favorite questions below, along with a bit of background explaining why I'm asking them and what I hope to learn from each one.
Q: Can you briefly describe your business? I would like to know the size, the main expertise, the location, etc.
I recommend starting every interview with this question. It gets people talking and gives you a lot of information that you can use to segment answers to the following questions (for example, looking at how big businesses respond compared to small businesses).
Q: What is your role within the organization? In which department is it located? How many people are on your team
This question gives you a good overview of who is using your product (especially for horizontal products that can be used by any department, such as project management tools). It can also help you segment answers to the following questions (for example, what are marketing teams used for versus finance departments for).
Q: What are the main goals and key performance indicators for your role?
By understanding the main goals and key performance indicators of your target audience, you can create messages that show how your product helps potential customers achieve the goals they are paid for.
Q: What are the main frustrations and pain points in your role?
By understanding the pain points and frustrations that matter most, you can create messages that show how your product can address those pain points and help them reach the goals and key performance indicators for their role (as outlined in the previous question).
Q: What are your goals with our product?
Basically, people are “engaging” your product to achieve something that they need to do. By understanding what task people need your product for, you can create an effective message that shows how your product can help them complete that task.
Q: Please describe briefly how you did it before discovering our product? What were the problems associated with this method?
By understanding what people used to do to achieve what your product is helping them achieve (and the pain points of the previous method), you can create an effective message that will convince them to change their process and use your product.
Q: What is the main benefit you get from using our product?
By understanding the main benefit that people get, you can start creating a message hierarchy that focuses on the main benefits that people get, rather than other benefits that you might think are important but aren't in reality. These answers are also interesting when segmented by role, industry, business size, etc. because they allow you to see the value that different types of users get from your product (for example, a CRM makes it easier for sales representatives to remember to follow up with prospects, but a manager mainly derives value from reporting and forecasting functions).
Q: What prompted you to look for a solution like ours?
This question, which is best asked to new customers, helps you understand what internal business events are causing people to seek a solution like yours, and can help you design sales and marketing strategies to find these people when they are in an active buying state, or even to trigger the purchase.
Q: What are the top three characteristics you're looking for in a product like ours?
Understanding people's priorities when they're looking for and evaluating a tool like yours can help you create effective messaging and content that shows that your product is best suited to their needs.
Q: What does the buying cycle for a product like ours look like? And who is involved?
This question can give you a good overview of the buying committee (or lack of a committee) that would be involved in buying your product, and can inform everything from the content on your website to the sales process you're building. For example, if you know that someone in the IT department is often involved in sales and is concerned about things like security and data governance, you can prepare content that addresses their concerns and speeds up the buying cycle.)
Q: What was your biggest fear or concern about using our product? Was there something that nearly stopped you from registering?
Understanding the various elements that prevent potential customers from signing up for your product allows you to spend time and effort removing these barriers and increasing conversion rates. A good example is LogMeIn, which surveyed people who downloaded its application but did not use it. They discovered that people weren't sure if the product was going to stay on the shelf because they didn't know how the company made money. By highlighting prices in the app and on the website, they increased conversions by 300%.
Q: What magazines, news sites, trade shows, blogs, etc. do you read to get professional information?
If you have a good understanding of where these people get their information, you can then plan activities at the top of the funnel to reach them. For example, if you know that they are all attending a particular event, you can plan to attend, or if they are actively involved in LinkedIn communities, you can try to promote your content there.
Action 3: Write the answers
Although it requires a bit of extra work, I have found that it is extremely useful to Write a summary of each interview in a spreadsheet (usually right after the interview is over)
In doing so, you benefit from a number of advantages:
- All answers in one place - If you only have the raw notes of each interview in individual documents, it is impossible to see all the answers to a particular question in one place, making it very difficult to identify trends. By contrast, by summarizing all of the answers in a spreadsheet, you can simply look in a particular column and see everyone's answers to a particular question all at once, making it easy to identify trends.
- Segmentation - By summarizing all of the answers in a spreadsheet and including relevant data about each customer, such as industry, job title, business size, etc., you can then start segmenting your answers and see how people in certain industries answer a question, or in businesses of certain sizes.
- Sharing - Every time I've done this exercise and produced Marketing Personas, someone wanted to see the raw qualitative data behind them. By summarizing all of the interviews in a spreadsheet, you can easily send it to them.
Step 3: Writing the personas
Now that you have a good idea of who your target segments are and have conducted a number of interviews with them, you should have all the information you need to start writing your Personas.
Use the model available within the resources to develop your personas. You can use key information such as:
- About them - A summary of information about them, including their role, their sector of activity, the size of their business, etc. All the relevant demographic information essentially.
- Use case - A summary of how they use our product, what they are trying to achieve with it, etc.
- Previous solution and pain points - A summary of how they achieved things before your product, and what were the pain points of this previous approach.
- Benefits - A summary of the main benefits they get from using your product.
- Purchase trigger - A summary of what makes them look for a product like yours.
- Purchase process - An overview of the typical process by which people buy your product.
- Factors of choice - A glimpse of the kinds of things they're looking for in a product like yours.
Step 4: Modeling and Validating Personas
Now that you've developed your Personas, it's time to put the information in the hands of the people who will use it.
How you do this will probably depend on the structure of your organization, who will use them, etc. but here are a few ideas from the methods I've used in the past:
Present them to your business
Prepare A presentation that highlights the personas you've created, along with information about what personas are, how they should be used in your organization, your methodology for creating them, sample customers for each persona, etc. and give a presentation to your business. This presentation can take place at an entire company meeting or only in front of a few key teams.
Model them
Of course, not everyone will need to model them as she is, but place the descriptions of your personas on posters in your office or your various other workspaces, so that the customer and their needs remain at the center of employees' concerns when they make decisions.
Invite real customers to talk to your employees.
Remember that a Persona is just a fictional representation of a set of real people, so why not ask some of these real people to come and tell their story?
The customer will usually give a short presentation or answer a few questions about how they use the product and then stick around to chat with the team.
It's a great way to keep marketing personas and the customers they represent at the top of the agenda long after the initial presentations and excitement have passed.
What is the difference between Buyer Persona and ICP?
Do you know what a buyer persona is? And the ideal customer profile (ICP)?
Have you ever confused these two terms? If yes, don't worry, you're not alone.
The two terms have a lot in common, but each is used for a unique purpose. It's still important to explain to you what each term means and how ideal personas (= marketing personas) and customer profiles play a role in your digital marketing strategy.
What is an ICP?
The ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of a fictitious account that would obtain significant value from your product or service, and that would in turn provide substantial value to your business.
This is the type of customer that costs you the least to acquire, stays with you for a long time, and has a high lifetime value (CLV), who is less likely to turn away from your product or service and who ultimately becomes an advocate for your brand.
ICP vs Buyer Persona: What's the Difference?
In short:
- Your ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the type of business you should try to sell to and its personas.
- Your buyer persona is a detailed analysis of the people who buy from you.
KPIs and Buyer Personas are different, but linked. You can have a KPI that has a few personas that your marketing team creates content for and that your sales team caters to.
💬 Therefore, an ICP is likely to have multiple personas as you can see below 👇👇👇
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5 reasons to use personas in your marketing
There are proven reasons why knowing who your marketing is aimed at is extremely important to get your message across and reach your audience effectively.
When created and used properly, the personas are at the heart of a complete marketing plan and are extremely useful marketing tools to ensure that you are consistently targeting your target audience.
Yet marketing personas are often overlooked or not taken seriously enough by marketers who assume they already know who they're talking to, or who don't care about their audience at all when they write.
Personas help you humanize your audience
Any time you have a failed marketing plan, you can almost always blame part of the problem on a poor understanding of who your customer is.
This misunderstanding can come from a lack of data, but also from an inability to humanize your audience. That's exactly what marketing personas are for.
It doesn't matter if it's not a real person, because you know that this data is built from information from your real customers. Being able to think of this marketing persona as someone with specific attributes and feelings makes it much easier to write your messages and help you write more effectively.
Marketing personas push you to ask the right questions
Another benefit of marketing personas is that they allow your business to think about the customer in the right way.
To create an effective buyer persona, you need to ask your current and potential customers the right questions in order to get an idea of who they are. These questions are as follows:
- How old are you?
- What is your job title?
- Who do you depend on at work?
- What is your biggest challenge in the workplace?
- What helps you do your job well?
- What resources do you lack?
These questions help you create an accurate and comprehensive persona, but they also allow you to develop your company's customer knowledge database, which is something you should be doing anyway. In other words, creating buyer personas is a great first step in becoming a company that is more attentive to knowing the customer in general. These are the questions that all marketing departments should ask their customers, whether they are buyer personas or not.
Personas get everyone on the same page.
Another advantage of buyer personas is that they can generally be used by all members of the marketing department, sometimes even by the whole company.
Having your team focus on two or three marketing personas is a great way to unify your marketing message and get everyone in agreement.
As a marketing department, you want to be sure that every step of your strategy is aligned. The content writers on your team target the same specific niche as your graphic designers and sales team. Personas simplify all of this and make it possible to get results in a really simple and effective way.
Personas keep you focused on writing.
If one of the main benefits of personas is to humanize your audience, the other is certainly Allow you to stay focused when you think and write.
It's so easy to get carried away when you come up with content ideas day in and day out. Having a specific persona that you are always targeting will be a small checkpoint in your head that will help you filter ideas.
- Is this an article that Bruno would like to read?
- Will Bruno be interested in this statistic?
- Am I telling Bruno something that he already knows?
- etcetera.
You can ask yourself all these questions when you have a well-detailed persona next to you that you can refer to, and this will save you a lot of time and editing later.
Marketing personas lead you to real potential customers
The final benefit of marketing personas that we're going to discuss here is that they pave the way to help you find real leads.
By doing research on Linkedin or Google+, you can match your imaginary personas to real people who fit that description and start targeting them.
Marketing personas show you who your audience is and who your new customers will be.
READ MORE: How do you use LinkedIn to define your marketing personas?
Using personas for strategic marketing decisions
In marketing terms, the insights gained from defining personas are used to develop more relevant messages, adapt content strategy based on the buyer journey, and create more targeted and personalized brand experiences.
Buyer personas help marketers better understand their customers (and potential customers) to uncover what makes them tick and choose one brand or solution over another.
Every aspect of marketing should benefit from knowing key persona characteristics: email, digital, content, and social. But how exactly do marketers use this information?
- Better customer segmentation: Marketing to everyone is not good for business. Even if there is a ready-to-use definition of the target audience, personas can add essential details that will strengthen the marketing strategy and bring in more qualified leads.
- Personalized brand experience: With a deeper understanding of the potential customer's pain point, marketers can create more targeted messages, more effective content delivery, and tailored offers.
- Identify where high-value prospects are located: content production is just the tip of the marketing iceberg - distribution and reach are just as important (if not more). The buyer persona profile should also mention where this particular audience “hangs out” in order to provide an overview of which channels and platforms to target with highly targeted content.
- Cross-marketing alignment: To maintain alignment between different marketing teams, marketers can always go back and review the defined persona profiles to ensure that their efforts are meeting customer needs.
Creating a Buyer Persona Template
Before collecting information, it is important to define the particularities that the persona profile (some call it a persona model) should encompass. From demographics to values, every piece of the puzzle will help marketers get a better idea of the “perfect” customer.
Initially, marketers tend to give their persona a fictional name and avatar (photo) and then fill in the following details:
Demographic data
This is the most basic level of data that should be included in the persona profile.
- Age/gender (try to be as specific as possible, as this can help the writing and design teams use the right language and style).
- Income level (including annual income)
- Location (town/suburb or city/country)
- Family status (especially important for B2C consumer brands)
- Level of education (especially important for content marketing teams)
Professional status
B2B and B2C businesses should pay attention to this part because they often need to determine whether they are targeting decision makers or actual users of the product or service.
- Job title and level (manager, professional, specialist, etc.)
- Industry
Psychography
Psychographic data relates to a person's values, views, and goals. This is an important part of the profile as people are increasingly insisting that businesses share their values, express their opinion, and participate in global conversations.
- Professional/personal goals
- Beliefs and values (for example, for American businesses, it may be important to know if their buyer persona is Democratic or Republican, religious or not, conservative or liberal, etc.)
Pain points and challenges
This is the section that marketers and other teams need to pay the most attention to. It is only by learning about the problems and obstacles encountered by customers that a company can develop and offer the most relevant solution.
- Main problems and pain points
- Obstacles that prevent them from overcoming the challenges they face
- Irrational/reasonable fears
Influences and information sources
To identify the ideal customer's buyer journey, find out who they listen to, who they trust, and on which platforms they're looking for solutions. This information is a valuable source for guiding influencer marketing, communication, public relations, and ad and content placement efforts.
- Blogs, social networks (facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.) and favorite websites
- Preferred media (digital and print)
- influencers and thought leaders they trust and admire
- Preferred events and conferences (online or offline)
Purchase process
The final section should reveal how the target persona makes buying decisions. This information will help amplify the buyer journey and sales, while helping digital teams define triggering events.
- The role of the persona in the buying decision process
- Potential life cycle (how often do they buy the product or service?)
- What is stopping them from making a purchase?
Matching the Persona with the right marketing tactics
Knowing the profiles of personas can amplify a company's marketing strategy, since there is a customer journey map (or buyer journey) adapted to each of them.
The best way to optimize the experience of potential customers and guide them smoothly through their journey is to focus on content marketing efforts — a crucial aspect of any digital marketing effort.
Using this easy-to-use matrix to define topic ideas and content types for each persona at a particular stage in the buyer journey can improve how a business approaches content marketing and overall digital marketing decisions and tactics.
These comprehensive guides on content marketing strategy and writing for search engines will provide you with the context and tools needed to optimize content based on the persona and the customer journey.
Summary
Knowing who the ideal customer is and who should buy the given service/product is an essential part of any marketing strategy. Defining the persona is one of the first essential steps in making better business, product, and marketing decisions and investments. Instead of trying to guess, take the time to take a data-driven approach to creating buyer persona profiles to implement more strategic and targeted marketing practices.
