The Power of Personas:
A Brief Guide, Part 1

You want your brand to tell a genuine story. One that will make an impact by grabbing attention and sparking conversations. All you need to get started is a great idea, right? Not entirely. For great content marketing to work, you need to better understand who you’re trying to reach. Have you ever stopped to consider your buyer’s backstory? What do they feel? What motivates or frustrates them? This is where buyer personas come in.

In this first installament of a two-part series, we’ll define buyer personas and how to gather the data that will bring them to life.

So to get started, a persona is the characterization of real data gathered from researching your target audience. Said data includes attributes, demography, geography and psychographic information. Basically, a persona should be the embodiment of the customer who loves your brand.

Example of a Persona Template

The idea is to model it as if he or she were a real person. With a persona, you can properly target your audience with marketing messages that incorporate just the right tones and address their unique needs and desires.

There are several ways a persona can benefit your brand. They can help you find, review and tailor your ideas to ensure your content is interesting, informative, relevant and actionable. Not only is this beneficial, it also makes it easier to form a relationship with your buyers; becoming their go-to resource for specific information about a product or service they might be looking for. People tend to be more receptive to what you have to say if you’re seen as someone who adds value to their life.

HELLO? IS IT ME YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?

For your personas to be most useful, they need to be based on actual information from your audience. As previously mentioned, you need to better understand the people you’re trying to reach. After all, a persona should represent the people who actually want to buy from you, not those you wish would buy from you.

But where do you start? First, you need to look towards research. It may seem a little overwhelming before you get started, but it’s really a straightforward process. Here are some pointers to help guide your research.

Ask yourself, “Who is buying my product/service?”
Dig into your current customer base to find out what kinds of people are already buying from you. Try to gather as much diverse information as you can. Relevant data points to look for include age, location, language, income, buying behavior, interests and activities, and life stage (things like new parenthood or retirement).

You can go about finding the information you need in a variety of ways. We recommend starting with any kind of customer records you have. From there, consider supplementing that information with email surveys, online surveys, focus groups or even customer interviews.

Additionally, there are plenty of analytics tools that can help with your research via social media. Using them can provide you with detailed information about people that are interacting with your brand, even if they’re not yet customers. And if you’re looking for some insight on reaching new audiences, check out our How to reach Hispanic Consumers Through Social Media article.

Finally, don’t forget to check out the competition. What can you learn from their marketing efforts that can help you make your brand stand out? However, just because they’re doing something different, doesn’t mean it will yield the same results for you. Keep that in mind while doing your marketing recon.

FIND OUT WHAT MAKES YOUR CUSTOMERS TICK

What’s The Problem?
Problems — as troublesome as they can be, are also one of the richest sources of customer insight. For your persona to feel even more dynamic and human, you have to include pain points. These are the frustrations, inconveniences and even annoyances that customers face and want to solve. However, identifying pain points isn’t simply realizing what a customer needs, but discovering why they need it and how they feel about their need.

Pain points can range from simple to wildly complex, depending mostly on what your brand does for the customer. For example, pain points for something like washing machines can be fairly obvious to determine. However, simple things such as jewelry have more complicated pain points, as they can become intangible: someone feels like they’re bored with their life, or that they don’t stand out, etc. These aren’t the easiest pain points to identify and can be even harder to address.

Asking the right questions can help with identifying valuable pain points. You can make them generic (i.e., not specific to an industry or field) or tailored to your brand’s area of expertise. Just be sure to ask thoughtful, open-ended questions that evoke sentiments from your audience. The following are just some of the questions to consider:

• What is frustrating them?
• What do they wish they had more of?
• What’s keeping them from pursuing their needs?

Another great source of insight about your audience’s gripes could be your salespeople. They have direct contact with people who are thinking about what you sell and a deep understanding of what your customers are trying to achieve through your products and services. Ask them what kinds of questions they get most often and see if they can help you identify any patterns. While you’re at it, try to collect actual quotes from your customers that you can use to give your persona more depth.

Goals
It’s also important to keep your customer’s goals in mind. Similar to pain points, goals range from personal to professional. Again, identifying them depends on what your customer is searching for and why they’re searching for it. For every action, there’s a motivation. Don’t hesitate to dig in deeper and figure out what motivates your audience. What do they wake up for every morning? What’s their end game?

One thing to consider is that your audience’s goals might be directly related to solutions you can provide, but they don’t have to be. Remember, the purpose of this is purely to get to know your customers.

The goals you create for your persona don’t have to specifically relate to your product’s features. Still, they can be the basis of a campaign, or they might be useful by informing the tone or approach you take in your marketing.

Ways to Listen
If you’re looking to learn more about what people have to say about your brand, there are several methods to try. Ask for feedback via in-person talks, calls, emails or messaging apps. Examine your customer surveys, online feedback and website analytics. Another excellent (and reasonably simple) way to discover people’s praises or complaints is through “social listening.”

As the term implies, social listening means actively listening (read paying attention) to conversations about specific topics or keywords that are happening online. The advantage to this method is that it’s a reasonably easy, two-step process. Start by monitoring your social media channels for any mentions of your brand, competitors, and any keywords that relate to your business. Afterward, try to find ways to implement any information you have gathered into your persona’s development.

Involving your brand within online conversations is a great source of insight for customer pain points and goals. You can learn why people like your business, why people look to your competition, or which parts of the customer experience are simply not working for your buyers.

WHAT COMES NEXT?

By following the simple steps above you’ll be off to a great start in identifying your buyer persona. You’ve got some homework to do, so we’ll break here. In part two we’ll show you how to analyze the info you’ve captured and break down how to not only create your buyer persona, but how to unleash its impact on your content strategy. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to leave a comment or shoot us an email at info@culturespanmarketing.com.