by David Depman

Your business success is tied to how well you market yourself. And in order to make your marketing efforts a success, you’ll need to understand your target audience.  You’ll need to focus your efforts on what they do and who they are. The idea being that if you are marketing to people outside of your focus groups, you are wasting your money and time.

The challenge is often not in knowing this, or in putting in the effort, but instead it is often how well you can see to whom it is you’re speaking. Developing the persona of your potential clients will help you to understand who they are, what they want from you, why they want your services, what their concerns are and ultimately, how you will connect with, and sell to them.

What’s a Persona?

Personas (or “personae” as our head of marketing prefers to pluralise it) are an amalgamation of traits assigned to a single character that you create. They represent potential client groups that need your products or services. Personas are constructed to be representative of potential customers and as such, they’re the collective biography of a single created person that represents your major types of customers. There might be 3, 5 or 10 individual personas that help to illustrate the groups of people to whom you need to market.

Build a Persona of your ideal customer

1. Give each persona a name and title. Make them human and refer to them by their names. Felicity Farmer, Henry Hipster, Goodie Twoshoes. Whatever helps in defining the group they represent. In fact, give each one a picture!
2. Give them a background: Fill in the basics with age, gender, where they live, their family life, their likes and dislikes, concerns, and dreams. Create their person, and know as much as you can about them.
3. What is their tech background? Are they online and what do they do on the web? What devices do they have, where do they surf? Do they ask for referrals or do they post on discussion boards? Where do they go online? List 3-5 websites that they might visit for fun, advice or recommendations. Do they like reddit.com or are they a NYT.com type?
4. Fill in their personal and professional life: where do they work, what’s their job history, what role are they in their company, what are their hobbies, activities, did they get a degree, do they do charitable work?
5. What are their Goals? What are their goals when looking for your product or service? What do they care about: speed, price, quality, local business, national backing? You need to know their goals if you are going to be the one who sells them a mortgage or house or home improvement.
6. What do they say about you or your product? Give them a voice, and imagine what they would say about you or your business. Give them opinions and thoughts about your industry. Do they want to do a lot of research before they contact you, or do they want you to tell them about all their options? Are they loyal, impulsive, considered?
7. I need / I want statements. Understand the difference between what they need and what they want. What they need is the reason they are talking to you, what they want is where you can build great connecting points with them.

By creating personas, you get more in touch with the sensibilities of your potential clients. You start to speak more of their language and mirror more of their traits. And when you have their identities clearly mapped, you can adjust your marketing accordingly. From knowing where to post advertisements, to what kinds of topics to blog about, understanding your clients will get you closer to them.

Not all persona exercises are the same.  One size does not fit all, though many parts of personas for different industries are similar.  You may want to tweak your own list to match your unique needs.

If you want to get to know your archetypal clients better, download our Persona creation template here and get working!

Tell us how creating a persona has helped you understand your clients better.