Creating Your Marketing Personas

Once you understand the purpose of marketing personas, it’s important to dive in and try and sketch them out. You are trying to absorb information about what your customers need and want, then use this to build the personas.

The first step is to take any research you have about your customers or create a survey to ask them what they want or need. Market research is a major discipline in its own right but even an online survey or phoning customers can help you understand them better if you don’t have access to anything more detailed. If you do, great, this is the time to put all those insights into action.

Now you’ve gathered your information, the goal is to sketch out some customer personas and put together profiles of people in your customer base as if they’re real.

Areas you may cover in your persona include:

• Background (basic details about the person, age/gender)
• Job (what kind of job might this person do?)
• Income (how much money does this person have to spend?)
• Information sources (where does this person find their information? TV? Social media? Newspapers?)
• Goals (what is this person trying to accomplish)
• Challenges or pain points (what issues does this person have?)
• Values (are there things that are important to this person?)
• Objections (what are things this person might have against buying your product or service?)
• Role in purchasing (are they the end buyer or do they just influence the decision?)
• Marketing message (What appeals to this person? Content marketing? Digital marketing? TV?)

Let’s give you a couple of examples. You have a new anti-ageing cream. It’s got really great natural ingredients but you’re planning to sell it at a fairly low price point so it’s affordable for lots of people.

Your persona work might sketch out Cynthia, who is 58, who loves getting value for money. She doesn’t just want cheap things but she loves to feel like she has got a bargain. She has a certain amount of disposable income but is a savvy shopper. Cynthia might be your core target persona. She is a big TV fan and watches lots of commercial TV channels such as ITV.

A secondary persona might be Alice. She is 32 and has just noticed some fine lines. She isn’t super focused on ageing due to her age, but she wants to upgrade from her usual cream. She isn’t going to spend a large amount of money as anti-ageing isn’t a huge concern, but she is very interested in natural products so this would attract her. Alice doesn’t really watch TV except Netflix to binge watch series, but uses a lot of social media. She gets product recommendations from Instagram.

Most businesses have some core, targeted customer personas, but you may also have some that are people who may also buy your product, even if they’re not the core group.

These days, the easiest way to create personas is to use a persona sheet or any free online tool that can help you build them.

Give creating your personas a go and share your efforts! We have attached a simple persona sheet here or you can go online and use the tool from HubSpot below.