How creating audience personas enhances a marketing strategy

When you’re marketing your business, you must consider who you’re marketing to. Whilst your audience could demographically be quite broad, your target customers likely have particular interests, challenges or lifestyles that are granular and specific. Your target audience’s demographics, behaviours, interests, wants and needs should align with you and what you sell.

What are audience personas and why do businesses need them?

Audience personas, a.k.a, buyer personas, marketing personas, or customer profiles, are detailed, researched, fictional descriptions and characterisations of someone who represents your target audience.

They differ from target audiences slightly – personas are fictional profiles of your customers, whereas target audiences are IRL people. An audience persona is a detailed, fictional descriptive profile of someone who represents your target audience.

You can have more than one buyer persona – but your priority as a business is to define them. For example, an estate agency might have the following multiple yet specific customer personas:

Aged 25-35 first time buyers, in a long-term relationship, full-time employment, interested in buying their first home – terraced or semi-detached, within a certain price point – within a particular geographical area
Aged 55+ homeowners who are considering their retirement, looking to downsize their home and buy a suburban or rural home within a particular geographical area
Aged 35-40 parents of nursery and primary school-age children needing to upsize and purchase a larger, ‘forever’ family home, equipped with a garden, within a particular geographical area near specific nurseries and schools

All sets of the estate agent’s audience personas are completely different, yet our example estate agency business needs to target them all. In this instance, the estate agency should curate content and advertising campaigns to suit each segment individually, as well as a group.

According to Google, “Personas are fictional profiles that represent groups of similar people in a target audience. They can help you figure out how to reach people on a more personal level while delivering the right messages, offers, and products at the right time.”

Before we work on building audience personas, let’s examine the benefits of doing so for your business’ marketing strategy.

The benefits of audience personas

There are multiple benefits for building audience personas:

Building stronger relationships with their audience, potential and existing customers
Making their marketing more personalised and effective
Appealing to specific people with definitive wants and needs who are going to buy from you, rather than trying to please everyone, because marketing to everyone is ineffective (not everyone is going to be interested in your business, products, and services)
Knowing exactly who you are talking to when promoting, advertising and marketing your business
Creating better content more suited to your target customers
Converting stronger, higher quality leads
Truly adding value to their feeds on social media, thus growing your social media following
Producing new ancillary products and services to serve your target customers
Speaking your audience’s language and understand them better
Driving more sales
Understanding exactly who your customers are and what they want and need from you

Researching to build audience personas

Before curating the audience personas you’re going to tailor your business marketing to, you can carry out research to find out more about your audience;

Conduct customer surveys and interviews (incentive’s usually help in coaxing consumers to complete surveys!)
Look at your reviews and testimonials – what are the common themes?
Ask for feedback from existing customers
Leverage existing data you have – your current following and existing customers demographics and interests
Engage in social listening

How to define audience personas: a framework

If it helps, you can give your personas a face (use a stock image, a cardboard cut-out, a drawing… get as creative as you like!), a faux social media profile, a made-up problem or circumstance… anything that helps you create your audience personas more effectively.

Think about how many target audience segments you serve/wish to reach (most companies have more than one) and then use the following framework to build your audience personas. You don’t have to consider every point, but you should use as many as possible to really narrow down who you should be creating social media content for and appealing to.

Demographics to consider when building your audience personas:

Age range
Gender
Marital/relationship status
Location/town/postcode
Job/industry
Income range/disposable income
Homeownership/living status
Education status
Family status/number and age of dependents
Political affiliation
Religious affiliation

Behaviours to consider when building your audience personas:

Interests
Hobbies
Aspirations
Purchasing habits and behaviours
Current challenges
Lifestyle circumstances and habits
Financial behaviours/their typical consumer journey

You can narrow this down to specific behaviours such as your customer’s typical holiday destinations and frequency, which news sites they read, how often they eat out, how much they spend on their homes each month, and so on. You can consider anything you like and apply it to your customer persona if it helps you better define your target consumer.

How can you build a relationship with them and appeal to them so that they buy from you?

Consider deeper factors. What are the goals of your customer persona in question? What is important to them? What do they value in a business? How does your product or service solve a challenge they’re facing? How can your business make their life easier, simpler, or better?

Audience personas and marketing

Once you’ve established your core audience personas, ensure your marketing team familiarise themselves with them so all your content marketing and social media campaigns are tailored to suit them.

Whenever you create content for social media marketing, keep your audience personas in mind. Consider;

How your content will appeal to your audience personas
How your content solves a problem for your audience personas
What you are selling/wanting from your audience personas

If you’re struggling to define your target audience and who you should be targeting and selling to, have a look at our guide to defining your target customer base.