Persona: how and why to create one for your company

Who works with marketing, advertising or already announced in the media was certainly ever asked about who the target audience of the company. This is because understanding the buyer is essential not only for product development but also for the production of content that will guide the acquisition of new customers.

In the production of material for the blog or the social networks of a company use an interesting feature that facilitates the targeting of topics: creating a persona, ie the definition of the typical customer, with all the major features of the buyers.

Meet this challenge to create and mount a persona, or multiple personas can be easier when you can ask the right questions. Then simply use this information in a productive manner so that every action and decision making are directed to that profile.

In this post, we will discuss the concept of persona, showing its importance for a business and teach you to create a persona ideal model to correctly guide the actions of your company. Check out!

After all, what is Persona?

Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal client. It is based on real data on behavior and demographic characteristics of the clients, as well as the creation of their personal stories, motivations, objectives, challenges and concerns.

A good definition of persona precisely through the contact with your target audience, so that in a quick analysis you can identify common characteristics among potential buyers.

If you have a customer base, this is the perfect place to start your research. Even if you have different profiles of people or companies who consumed their product, some of them tend to exemplify his persona.

An important tip is to focus both satisfied as dissatisfied customers. In either case, you certainly learn something about the perception of your product and what challenges customers are facing.

What would be the difference between persona and target audience?

It is common that there is some confusion in concepts, but one thing we can say for sure: persona and audience are not synonymous.

Go to a practical example:

• Target:  Men and women, 24-30 years old, single, graduated in architecture, with an average monthly income of $ 3,500. They intend to increase their job skills and like to travel.
• Persona:  Pedro Paulo is 26 years old, is newly formed and autonomous architect. Think of develop professionally through a master’s degree abroad because loves to travel, she is single and always wanted to do an exchange. It is seeking an agency to help you find universities in Europe to accept foreign students.

You understand the difference? Target audience is, in general, a broad segment of society to whom you sell your products or services. Already the persona, as spoken in the discussion above is the representation of your ideal customer, more humane and more personalized.

At first it may sound very similar. But it makes all the difference think of a marketing strategy directed to Pedro Paulo and not to a large audience.

Moreover, no need to limit yourself to a single persona, if you think you have targeted too deeply. It is common for businesses to have more than a defined persona. But do not overdo it. If a persona can greatly limit your audience, many personas can make your strategy to lose focus.

Why create a persona?

Creating personas is seen as a key step in a strategy Digital Marketing results. We create personas to send the right message to the right people and thus under greater chances of success.

Without a defined persona, it is possible that in some cases their strategy is lost and you end up speaking Portuguese for those who only understand Greek. Or promoting cuts of meat for those who are vegetarian. Or offering your product for the class A to class C. Among other examples.

So, we list a few reasons that prove the importance of creating personas for your business:

• Determine the type of content you need to achieve your goals;
• Set the tone and style of your content;
• Help design their marketing strategies showing the public that should be focused;
• Define the topics on which you should write;
• Understand where the prospects seek your information and how they want to consume them

Questions that will help you set a Persona

Once you understand what’s persona, what its advantages for your business and get some preliminary information, you need to be guided by your typical customer profile.

That is, it should be guided by the most to answer some questions that will help define the behavior of your persona profile:

• Who is your potential customer? (Physical and psychological characteristics of the person responsible for purchasing)
• What kind of subject interested him about your industry?
• What are the most common activities that it performs (both personally and professionally)?
• What is your educational level? What are your challenges and obstacles?
• What kind of information it consumes and what vehicles?
• What are your goals, your difficulties and challenges?
• In the case of B2B products, which is the type of company that buys your solution? And what is the position of those who purchase?
• Who influences their decisions?

In short, you need to keep in mind that the person responsible for purchasing your product or service search on the scope of your company. Think of the issues she may be interested, for example the problems it faces on a day-to-day related to your industry.

Having completed this process, you will have a good amount of raw data on potential consumers.

Creating a Persona

The next step is to detail the customer profile from the responses. With this, you can unify the information and develop the character into a document to be made available to everyone in the company can benefit from the study that you did.

Some features we use to define the personas here at Digital Results:

• persona name (fictional)
• Sex
• Age
• Position / Occupation
• hive of activity
• Level of education
• Media used
• persona goals
• persona Challenges

We create names for the personas as this facilitates internal discussions, putting persona targets: “But do you believe that John Carlos would be interested in that?”.

Another possibility is to use a little beyond a graphical model to represent the persona.

Remember to also consider that the persona may be a visitor who just arrived, you do not know or are looking for your business, but the solution to a problem – it is quite common to happen on websites of companies that do Inbound Marketing .

So, think: how can the approach and the exposure of the content related to your market for this person?

Fantastic Generator Personas

If you still feel a bit of trouble when creating the ideal persona for your business, then use our tool designed for this purpose.

The Fantastic Personas generator is a step-by-step that will assist you in creating that persona. At the end of the steps, the tool will make available for download a PDF with all the persona of documented information.

A tip is you print this document and share it with your company. You can paste the pictures on walls, murals or paintings to give a more prominent, or also available on a drive in the cloud so that all employees have quick access.

Next steps: Align the personas with the purchase journey

After defining the personas, your business is ready to communicate in the most appropriate way with your prospects.

The next step is to create a relationship strategy based on buying journey of these personas.

Your company can create content based on the buying journey of your persona and then use this purchase journey to make a marketing automation planning .

To help you in this process, we have a complementary tool: the Purchase Journey generator , a step-by-step instructions for you to set and meet quickly and easily the ways that their personas tread until they are ready to buy your product or service .