How to Create a Target Audience Persona

Whether you’re developing your 2021 marketing plan or even a simple social media post, do you ever feel just… stuck?

Sometimes you don’t know what to write or why you’re even taking the time to do this in the first place. There’s one thing I keep bringing my clients back to when they’re feeling scrambled and trying to think of the next great idea to help their business: The Target Audience Persona.?

Sometimes called avatars, customer personas, or ideal users, target audience personas help give you a roadmap on why you do the things you do. It defines your niche. Who exactly are you selling to? Why are you writing that certain blog post? Why are you adding this tactic to your marketing plan? Why are you developing this giveaway versus another option? It narrows your focus so you can be uber clear on why you’re putting the time and effort into some tactics over others.?

Audience Persona Definition

Content marketing is huge right now in both B2C and B2B realms. To make it work, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to, who you’re creating all this content for, and ultimately, who you’re selling to. You want to define it down to a person and we want to know this person inside and out: we want to know their wants, their needs, their challenges, their struggles, their loves, their hates. You want to know them intimately.?

A target audience persona represents your perfect customer. This one single person is the potential customer who wants and needs your content, product, or services. You also love working with this person as well. They need you, you love working with them.?

Persona vs. target audience

You might be wondering why we’d be developing this persona for just one person. There are billions of people in this world and lots of them need what you’re selling. So why would you focus your efforts on just creating for one person?

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “target audience” before. You can talk about your target audience in broad terms like when understanding who’s in the audience at your keynote speech or who’s following you on social media but not always engaging.?

But the difference between a target audience as a whole and a persona is the specificity. When talking about a persona, you’re trying to nail down the characteristics of the person you. most want to sell to. It’s impossible to know a whole audience intimately. But if you can pick one person out of that audience that you want to sell to and help define their wants and needs, it helps your decision-making process on how you can fix their problems with your product or service and how to market that.?

So think of a persona as just that. Your ideal customer. A single person that you’d love to sell to over and over again. Someone who values what you have to offer and will pay what it’s worth.?

By putting your efforts toward this one person, you’re not limiting yourself. You’re actually doing the opposite by being laser-focused on what your ideal customer wants and needs. This focus pays off tenfold. You can’t and don’t want to be everything for everyone.?

You will attract a lot of people that fall under the umbrella of your “persona” but don’t worry about it! Let’s just narrow it down to one or two.?

If you’re not clear on who your target audience persona is your message won’t be clear, it’ll be diluted, and it’ll lack relevance. If you try to attract everyone, you’ll attract no one. If you try to have a general avatar, you’ll have an unclear, diluted message.

Look, there’s a lot of noise online. When you’re not laser-focused, you’re more likely to get lost in the sea of voices. When you’re general, your topics can get kind of boring. When you’re laser-focused, you stand out to the people that resonate with you most.?

Creating audience personas

Have you ever had an experience with a brand that just blew you away? It was almost like the experience, the product, the online class, or even the person was made for you and was exactly what you needed at that point in your life or business. Maybe it was a specific training program to help you with a certification or a business coach to take your company to the next level. It could even have been the perfect pair of jeans that stretched and hugged in all the right places — again, like they were made for you.?

Can you remember the last time you found something that was just what you needed? For me, recently, it was a freelance writer I found on LinkedIn (shout out to you, Rachel Cooper!) who showed up right when I needed her most in my business. It was an immediate connection and only a week later, she began supporting me and my clients in much of our SEO writing work.? She was literally the answers to my prayers and was exactly what I needed in my business.?

That’s the feeling we want to get from our audience and why we create these target audience personas. As business owners, we want to create the type of experience for our target audience personas where they say the same thing, “This was exactly what I needed.” Even better? We want them to say, “Do you read minds or something? Because this is what I needed at this very moment!”

For this to happen, we need to intimately understand our target audience persona. Their fears, their aspirations, what keeps them up at night, what they’re thinking and what they’re needing. Today’s blog post is all about finding your target audience persona so you can build, market, and sell exactly what they need and when they need it.?

How to build audience personas

You might be wondering, how am I supposed to know exactly what my target audience persona really wants? I hear this question a lot. You must put yourself in their shoes. When you do this, you’ll understand what they like, what they don’t like, what their aspirations are, and most importantly, what their fears are.?

Once you figure this out (and get a little creative with it!) you’ll realize that your products or services are a solution to their needs and wants. And they’ll pay for it because you know how to get them results or the transformation they’re looking for.?

But how do you put yourself in their shoes? It’s actually simpler than you think.? First, connect and listen to them.?

First, write a detailed description of your target audience persona. Dive deep. You’re most likely going to be making this person up (I know, sounds kind of strange). OR you might already have a raving customer that is your target audience persona.?

To write about them, first, you need to give them a name. Yes! Even if this person is made up, you need to give them a name and a face (even if you find it off Google).

What’s interesting is many times, your target audience persona is actually a version of you from the past. That’s because most likely, you got into business by developing a solution to your own challenges that you used to have and want to solve them for others. As you become more sophisticated, though, it would be better to think of past clients you’ve worked with that you got amazing results for. Stepping outside of yourself and focus on someone else, allows you to understand who you like to work with as well.?

So you’ll want to ask questions like:?

• What do they look like?
• How old are they?
• Where do they hang out online?
• What books do they read?
• What Inspires them?
• What blogs do they read?
• What podcasts do they listen to?
• What are their biggest pain points or frustrations? What keeps them up at night?

You might know this information if you get creative and think deeply about the conversations you’ve had with past ideal clients. But if not, you can also send out a survey to specific people with some of these questions. Or you can do your own online investigation. Go into Facebook groups, online forums, comment sections of other people’s blogs, etc.?

One idea would be to go to a competitor’s blog that you know is attracting your target audience persona. It might be a direct competitor or even someone that has a similar message as you, even if it’s in a completely different industry. Go to their blog’s comment section and just read. What are people talking about? What are they asking? What struggles are they sharing??

Have an abundance mentality. Just because someone else is serving your target persona, doesn’t mean they have hold of that niche. Even if you have the exact same services or product as that person or company, you aren’t the same. Some people will vibe better with you and appreciate you’re outlook on the topic more! So don’t be afraid to dig into a shared audience. There are going to be little quirks or distinctions that make your target persona different from theirs.?

Talk to your audience persona to confirm beliefs

Next, we want to make sure we’re confirming what our investigation and gut is telling us about our audience personas. Amy Porterfield, someone who I’ve been learning from for years now, says that having validating calls with your target audience persona is crucial. Although uncomfortable, this is the most important step you can take in this whole journey. You might have in mind a few people that you’d absolutely love to work with that you think would be your ideal persona. Maybe someone in a networking group or a previous client. Meet with them! It’s OK if they turn out to not be your target persona – that just means you’re one step closer to nailing it.

Amy recommends having this be a video call or in-person meeting. There’s a lot you can gather from someone’s expressions. In this conversation, you can ask directed questions. Make sure you listen more than you talk! The words the person uses are GOLD for future copy and sales pages. Ask their permission to record the call so you can pull out phrases for later.?

Amy stresses that you should never move forward with a business or product idea until you truly understand who your ideal target persona is. With the information you gather from them, it might spark 100 new ideas that blow your old ones out of the water because they are so aligned with your customer. In addition, any idea you have in the future you can then confirm with your ideal persona, now that you know who they are. Put the idea in front of them and get their feedback!

Conclusion

Whenever you make content, whether it’s written, video content, or social media, imagine you’re writing and producing for your ideal target audience persona. It’ll make sales, product innovation, and content creation a much more intentional process.?

And remember, you can always have more than one ideal target audience persona and you can tweak and refine as you go along. You don’t have to get it all right immediately. Just start with one, nail it down, and create for THEM.