Strategy

Creating personas for marketing that have impact

• What are marketing personas and why do we use them?
• Steps and tips for creating marketing personas

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Meet Robin. She’s the new head of marketing at Work Squirrel, a small but fast-growing managed-services provider based in Edinburgh. The company has been around for just under 10 years, selling intranet solutions to clients in Scotland and the north of England.

When Robin started at the company three months ago, she didn’t know huge amounts about building intranets, but she does have a post-graduate degree in marketing from the University of Leeds’ business school and a couple of years’ experience as a marketing exec at a sports company in Manchester. She moved to Edinburgh to live with her boyfriend.

During her first couple of months at Work Squirrel, Robin has been settling in, gaining an understanding of the company and reviewing their existing marketing material while trying to build up a strategy to make the business grow. Besides an outdated website and a blog with two posts published in 2014, Work Squirrel really doesn’t have a lot of marketing material to help her.

Getting started

Put yourself in Robin’s shoes for a minute: she’s in a new city at her first major job and is the only marketing person at the firm. That’s quite a lot of pressure. She doesn’t know the company inside out and she’s keen to make a good impression on the CEO. He’s not convinced that the company even needs to do any marketing, since they seem to be growing quite well without it.

What should Robin’s task list look like? What do you think she needs to be doing at this stage to start making an impact on the company and streamlining its marketing?

I believe creating personas for marketing should be the first thing that Robin does. Personas are a useful way of targeting your marketing material to a specific target audience who you think will be interested in buying your company’s wares. Work Squirrel doesn’t currently have any personas, but when Robin creates her own, she’ll be able to produce content which much more effectively reaches her target audience.

In this blog post, I’ll describe how to create personas for marketing – from Robin’s point of view She’s been given a pretty tight deadline to create a new marketing strategy, and wants to create and present her personas to the board in just a few days.

Want to start creating personas for marketing right away? Click here for your free customer persona template download.

What’s an audience persona again?

You might have guessed it already, but Robin is one of the personas we’ve developed for our own marketing at Fifty Five and Five. She works as a marketer at a Microsoft Partner and needs services like ours. If the concept of a created persona attempting to create a persona for her fictional company seems a bit meta, I understand. But, there is a point to this! When we develop our audience personas, we focus on creating characters with realistic back stories, personal lives, pressures, pain points and goals. Without these, our marketing would become too vague, unrelatable and, really, of no use to anyone.

Robin’s a great example of a persona, but to define one a bit more clearly, here’s a definition from HubSpot:

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

HubSpot go on to mention that personas should include demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, goals and more. So, let’s break that definition down a little to work out what exactly a persona really, is and explore how you can create them for marketing with long-term impact.

A “semi-fictional representation”

Robin isn’t a real person. But I’ve designed her based on an amalgamation of similar marketers I’ve met while working with B2B technology providers. Robin’s persona is therefore very detailed; the more detail, the better our content can be targeted to answer her questions, concerns and worries. The fact that her boss isn’t convinced he needs a marketing department at all, for instance, is a common problem with small B2B tech providers that marketers often need to overcome.

“Your ideal customer”

Robin is a figment of our collective imaginations, but we all want to work with people just like her. Of course, it’s best practice to have anywhere between three and five personas to make sure your marketing also answers the needs of different audiences. I currently use four ‘ideal customers’ – some of them are in far more established roles than Robin - while others don’t even work as marketers. You get the idea.

“Market research and real data”

While Robin may be a figment of my imagination, the creation of her personality and traits are taken from real-life people and experiences. Before designing Robin’s persona, I did a lot of research, speaking with existing customers at firms like Robin’s and using examples of similar individuals from LinkedIn.

So, we now know what an audience persona is more generally, how can Robin create one that’s actually useful in her specific company? When she first begins creating personas for marketing, where should she start?

Know your audience – doing the research

Robin needs to write between three and five personas for her upcoming presentation to the board. Less than that, and they won’t be specific enough, more than that and she won’t realistically be able to create enough marketing material to speak to all those people. To begin, let’s imagine the types of people that will be buying Work Squirrel’s intranets.

To get this information, Robin sets up meetings with her sales representatives, and the CEO, to find out more about Work Squirrel’s existing customers. She also reviews a customer list that Work Squirrel has in Excel and does her own research, from sources such as Marketing Land and CMS Wire to get a better idea of the lay of the land. She then creates a list of typical buyers:

Robin has already got a better idea of who she should now market to. So far, so obvious. Things need to get a lot more specific before she can really present a serious set of personas to the board.

Picturing your ideal customer

Robin’s next step is to create a detailed picture of Work Squirrel’s ideal customers. This is all about working out the buyer’s wants and needs. Let’s look at how she started developing her persona around the CIO – Work Squirrel’s most common customer profile.

As Robin starts creating the persona, she’s already got a much clearer idea of what her marketing needs to look like. She’s starting to picture the kinds of messages that need to be on the website; the kinds of landing pages her company needs to build; the kinds of blog posts she needs published and the kinds of third party magazines she needs to place ads and articles in.

But this still isn’t enough. Robin is creating personas for marketing that will need to be a lot more specific if it’s to really have any impact.

What do your customers look like?

The more detailed your buyer persona, the better. They must be much more than a few words on a page; the audience persona needs to come to life. It should almost be as if you know them yourself.

Let’s see what Robin did with the CIO she began outlining earlier.

By creating such a detailed persona, Robin is now able to create marketing material that’s a lot more focused. When she presents the personas she’s designed to the board, they are sure to be impressed.

Giving those audience personas impact

So, you’ve created a set of believable, accurate and realistic personas. So what? All too often, personas get written in a burst of marketing enthusiasm before being left on a shelf somewhere, never to be used again. But this is a real shame – when used well, personas can have a profound impact on your marketing. So, here’s a checklist to ensure your personas actually get used:

• Print out your personas, tack them to the wall beside your desk.
• Define campaigns by who they’re targeted at. Any landing pages, articles, blog posts, SEO research or whatever else will be separated by persona.
• Orientate all campaigns to specifically target the needs and challenges of specific personas

Creating marketing personas is an essential stage in any marketing activity, and should form the basis of all your campaigns and long term strategy. To get started on creating your very own Robin, download our free customer persona template here. And, if you want any help with your personas, talk to us today.

by Chris Wright