The world of Marketing is full of different concepts, some being more common sense than others. In today’s article, I introduce you to the concept of Persona, differentiating it from the concept of the Target Audience.
What is a persona?
A persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on real data about your customers’ demographics, spending habits, motivations, goals, and pains. Defining a persona for your business will help you to better understand your (potential) customers, facilitating the process of developing your communication strategy and meeting your customers’ needs.
When defining the marketing strategy, one starts by defining the target audience for the business, and it is common to confuse this concept with the concept of persona, even though they are different concepts. The target audience refers the definition of demographic and psychographic characteristics of the typical customer, such as:
➔ Gender: Female
➔ Age: 25-40 years
➔ Annual income: €10,000 – €20,000
➔ Location: North of Portugal
➔ Interests: Travel and Business
➔ Attitude : Optimistic and ambitious
➔ Challenges: Lack of time and resources
The persona, in turn, characterizes specific members of the target audience, and its purpose is to uncover information about the customer’s buying journey, helping to define an effective marketing strategy for each market.
How to define a persona?
To define your persona it is necessary to collect various information, such as:
➔ Name: naming each persona will help your team to remember its characteristics whenever you need to work with that persona;
➔ Background: list the characteristics that describe this persona, such as their habits, work, career, family, among others;
➔ Demographics: identify the gender, age, income and location of the person
➔ Psychographic data: what type of personality defines the person, what is their typical behavior, among others;
➔ Objectives: what are the objectives that guide the persona;
➔ Challenges: what are the persona’s challenges that prevent her from achieving her goals;
➔ What you can do: how can you help the persona achieve their goals;
Defining the persona is essential to the success of your marketing and sales strategy as it increases your activity reach and conversion rate. Do you still have questions about the topic or do you need help defining your persona(s)? Talk to us!
Sources:
- https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research
- https://frontiermarketingllc.com/buyer-personas-target-audiences/