How to create and use target personas in marketing communications

Target personas: an extremely powerful marketing tool

Effective communication is based on an in-depth understanding of your customer base. You need to know who your customers are and which channels they use to stay informed. You need to uncover their fears, pain points and ambitions in order to engage with them successfully. Creating target personas is a way of capturing common customer motivations, worries and behaviours into ‘personality’ that you can then refer to when developing marketing commnications.

What are target personas?

To facilitate a better understanding of your customers, we create audience profiles or target personas, also known as buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your customers that help you visualise their needs, habits and motivations. They are a way of categorising your customers so that you can create relevant and distinct messaging aimed at resonating with each persona at different stages of their customer journey.

To start, ask your potential buyers and known customers some of the following key questions:

• What is your job title and key responsibilities?
• Where do you go for professional insight? (i.e. LinkedIn, trade media etc)
• What are your concerns? What keeps you awake at night?
• What are the key capabilities or expertise you are looking for in a supplier/service?

If you are struggling to find potential buyers or willing customers to quiz in this way, then talk to the people in your business who know them best – try business development and customer success teams. Another approach is to use LinkedIn creatively, try a poll, a ‘curious question’, or comment on another piece of media and ask your audience for their thoughts.

This information informs the development of typical personas, which may look like this:

Do I really need personas?

You really do. Without personas, your communication will be impersonal, completely untargeted and therefore ineffective. Personas guide the development of your key messages. They ensure you are targeting the right people with messages that are compelling and tailored to the specific stage of the buying cycle they’re currently at. They reduce waste and promote marketing/sales collaboration.

Personas are integral to campaign planning as they ensure that at every stage of the journey, customers receive an appropriate type of message that nudges them to the next stage of the buying process.

How you should use target personas

Personas should be a living and breathing concept, not a document to be produced and filed away. Individual personas must have a degree of longevity and flexibility.

Personas should be updated over time, or new personas created, in line with your evolving business strategy and changing market dynamics.

Target personas will definitely be used in marketing and PR, but different business teams ought to be familiar with your set of target personas too! Product or service development, Business development and Customer service teams will all benefit from understanding your business’ target personas, to help meet their needs more effectively. In our experience, it is particularly important that personas, along with key messages, are socialised within the company to ensure that teams internalise them and refer to them to guide their content and messages on a day-to-day basis.