In this reading, you will learn about creating customer personas to reach your intended audience. By analyzing certain customer data points, you will be able to determine the type of content your audience engages with.
Table of Contents
Why is it important to know your audience?
When you identify your audience, you can create digital marketing campaigns that interest and engage them. This can lead to brand growth and increased awareness.
Knowing your audience involves learning details about their lives, such as their geographic location, interests, online activities, and preferences. It’s important to understand what content your audience likes and how they like to consume it. For example, do they enjoy receiving humorous content via email? Maybe they like to be introduced to new products via social media ads. Perhaps they are more likely to engage with an ad if they see it while they’re on a website they frequent. There is a lot to consider when you are thinking about your audience, but start by learning who they are.
Who is your audience?
Understanding customer personas
Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They are profiles of your likely customers, based on data and research. Creating customer personas can help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products. Personas allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may actually turn into customers, rather than random people who may not have any interest in your company at all.
There are a few ways to create customer personas. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Xtensio, and Up Close & Persona have persona generators built in. However, if you prefer to create your own, you will need to conduct some research.
Asking the right questions
Using surveys, interviews, and/or data that already exists in your automation tools, you can find the information needed to create your personas. That information will most likely be demographics like gender, age, geographical location, income, education, and job type.
If you collect this information through surveys or interviews, it’s important you ask questions based on your business’ goals. Sometimes, it’s as simple as finding out your customers’ personality traits, hobbies, and which social media platforms they use to engage with brands.
A customer persona example that includes sections labeled for identifiers, background, demographics, goals, and more
Note: Your customer personas may not look exactly like this. They may be more or less detailed or include different information. It’s all about what is right for your company. You will get more in-depth instructions on how to create customer personas in a later reading.
Key takeaways
Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They:
- help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products
- allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may actually turn into customers
- can be created manually or using automated tools