Audience.

It’s a pretty big, all encompassing term.

The trouble with thinking in terms of an audience, or a marketplace/sector is that your marketing content could be too general and end up not engaging anyone. What a waste!

Q: What’s the answer to this?

A: Breaking your audience down into personas and creating content specifically for them.

A persona (aka avatar, buyer persona, or marketing persona) is a fictional character that encapsulates the behaviours, challenges, goals and needs of your very real ideal customers.

Effectively, personas help you to understand your customers better (and recognise them when you see them) and can help you to produce powerful marketing content because it is aimed at a specific subsection of your audience.

Even better, personas aren’t hard to create. It’s simply a matter of asking the right questions, listening and putting the information together in a clear format which helps both you, your team and company understand them.

The good thing is, your personas will be based on people who already buy from you (or people considering buying), so you will have the opportunity to ask them questions about:

• Their role and responsibilities
• Their goals
• Their personal ambitions
• Their work & online behaviours
• Where they get their industry news from
• How they learn
• Their main challenges
• Their needs

Then look for commonalities and patterns. How can they be grouped? What story are they telling you? Once this information has been recorded, you can start to fill in your persona template.

Give them a name. Even find a photo of someone who represents them. The aim is for you to feel as though you know them intimately. This is the power of a persona; taking the abstraction out of “audience” and turning into a tangible somebody you can relate to and serve.

If actually speaking to people in your audience isn’t feasible for whatever reason, the next best approach is using empathy. Step into their shoes. How do they feel about their job? What is important to them? What is their worldview?

I’d recommend going as far as writing a couple of paragraphs in their own voice – this way you get inside their head (“If you want to sell what John Smith buys, then you need to see through John Smith’s eyes”).

This puts you in prime position to intimately understand them, their goals and needs and therefore craft content, products and services that provides more value than anyone else.

Key Takeaways

• Personas are very important marketing assets as they help you intimately understand the very people you want as customers
• They are simple to create and are a combination of market research, empathy and psychology
• Creating personas will enable you to craft marketing messages with more power as they’ll be highly targeted, aimed at someone specific
• You can create multiple personas if this is suitable to your particular business.

Download our totally free, simple persona template here. No email required!