What is audience persona?

In a targeted marketing, you should know your customers and act based on their interests and personality traits. In this way, all your efforts to attract customers will be more efficient. Preparing and designing customer personas is one of the most practical methods of targeting marketing.

What is a persona?

Persona means certain characteristics of a person that can be defined by others. In other words, the internal characteristics of a person that may not be visible to those around them or that one must be very close to the person in order to recognize them are not considered to be part of the persona. Rather, very obvious characteristics such as being a mother, age, job, level of education, and so on are called personas. Of course, behavioral and emotional characteristics are considered more.

What is audience persona?

Usually, in order to be more targeted, content producers and marketers design the persona of the audience so that they can produce content or market according to their tastes and characteristics. These cases are included in the group of anthropology or demography.

This list includes the following features:

·???? Age

·???? Gender

·???? Job

·???? Location

·???? Favorites

·???? Income

·???? Problems and needs

·???? Vision and way of looking at the world

What is a customer persona?

The same applies to sellers. If you are a seller, it is better to draw your customer persona so that you can better sell your products or services to customers.

For example, if you sell baby products, your customer personas are young mothers or fathers who are expecting a baby. In the following, I will tell you how this valuable information will help you increase sales.

What is the difference between customer persona and audience persona?

?As mentioned, audience personas are used to attract site users to content or click on ads. As mentioned in the audience persona section, these characteristics include a series of general characteristics of the audience. In addition, at the beginning of the sales funnel, you need a large audience, some of whom are supposed to become customers at the end of the funnel.

Therefore, to write customer personas, we must be more precise. For this purpose, we categorize the audience based on the purpose they have for purchasing, the type of need they have for purchasing, etc., and we write the characteristics of each category in more detail.

As you can see, in general, it can be said that the audience persona is much more general, while the customer persona is more detailed and divides the audience into more detailed categories.

The necessity and importance of creating customer persona or audience persona

Unlike the old methods, the new marketing is customer-oriented. By knowing your customer, you can create content that users like. Also, by creating a buyer persona, you will know how to use your time and capital to get the most return for you and attract more buyers.

What is the use of knowing people's personas in marketing?

By knowing people's personas, you will understand what kind of content each group of people is attracted to and which influencers will influence them. In this way, you can do marketing specifically for your products according to the buyer persona, and as a result, get the most benefit from your efforts.

Information gathering methods for customer persona design:

Now the question is how to get the desired information to design the persona of the audience or customer. In other words, how do we know what our customers' characteristics are, what they are interested in, how much their income is, what is their purpose of buying and….

For this purpose, there are various tools that we will introduce below:

Interview:

One of the best ways to create customer personas is to interview people who have recently purchased from you. These people can accurately represent the characteristics of a real buyer because they have made a purchase from you. In addition, because they have bought a new product, they are excited and therefore they will cooperate more.

Maybe some of these buyers are not satisfied with their purchase. You should also interview them. Maybe the number of these buyers is more than satisfied buyers. In this case, you will also be aware of the problems that these buyers had with the products. For example, they may tell you that working with the product was difficult!

Questionnaire:

Another suitable tool for preparing a buyer persona or audience is preparing a questionnaire. You can write your desired questions in a questionnaire and then email it to your online buyers or website audience and ask them to answer your questions for better service.

In order to create an incentive to respond, it is better to consider a discount code for respondents.

A/B test

A/B testing is usually used in website design to determine which version of two different modes has a greater impact on attracting users. In this way, two completely identical versions of the same web page are designed, and only one tested element (for example, the color of the call to action button) is different on the two pages. Then these two pages are made available to an equal number of users at the same time to see which one is more popular and, for example, gets more clicks.

In this way, we find out which color will attract the attention of our customers and click on the desired button. In the same way, we can test other elements of the website on customers and create a more complete persona of the audience.

Access to customer social networks:

One of the other ways to prepare a customer or audience persona is to use the customer's social networks. Many customers complete their profiles on their Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and you can create an almost complete persona by accessing their profiles on these networks.

Also, by finding people's Instagram page, you can find out their lifestyle and in this way get to know the household appliances they need and many other needs.

Use of cookies:

You must have seen that many sites inform you after entering that this site uses your cookies. You can also have this feature on your website using tools and find out the interests of people who visit your website through cookies. See what pages they visit. How they spend their time on the Internet and many other information.?

How does customer persona help increase sales?

In the simplest case, by dividing customers based on personas, instead of sending a group email to all the people whose email you have, you can categorize them based on their interests and personas and send emails to each group based on their interests and needs. In this way, you will increase the efficiency of your email marketing.

In addition, by producing targeted content based on the buyer persona, you can draw buyers who intend to buy to the desired page and after a persuasive content, tailored to the interests and needs of the audience, by embedding a call to action button, push the person to buy.

How to design a correct customer persona?

In order to do the right thing in preparing the customer persona and not go wrong, follow the steps below:

Research your target customer:

The best way is to look at your current customers, especially those who have bought from you a few times. Find their common characteristics. Use the tools we mentioned above, make a phone call, or send an email questionnaire to find commonalities.

Make common features fewer and more specific: Choose only the features that are most important and seen by the majority of customers. Choose the ones that affect your relationship with your customers. For example, if everyone in your statistical community has faced a common problem, this is considered an important issue that can be effective in your sales. Other important issues are:

?Personal information (age, job, etc)

Behaviors (skills, interest in certain products, how they use your services or products, what they read or what videos they watch, etc)

Interests and problems (here you will find your customers' weaknesses)

Email behaviors (how often they visit their email, what time of day they open their email, etc)

?

Create separate personas:

Divide people into different categories. Put people with the same problems and goals in a group. For example, if you are a fitness trainer, some people join the gym with the goal of building muscle, some with the goal of gaining weight, and others with the goal of losing weight. So you will have three different personas.

Give each persona a name:

When you give each persona a real name, you give that persona a real personality, and when you write an email or post to them, you personalize it for that person, so you're talking to them exactly. This will be more effective. You can even choose a picture for him!

Persona design in industrial marketing:

Industrial marketing means B2B or business-to-business marketing. Here a wholesale manufacturer sells its products to other retailers. Here, for persona design, buyer companies should be considered instead of individuals.

In this case, in addition to the things that have been said so far, a series of other things related to the company should also be considered, including:

Buyer characteristics

How many years your intended company has been established?

Where is it located?

What industry does they work in?

How much is their purchasing power?

On what basis are their purchasing decisions made?

What are their advertising slogan and purpose?

To find their product sources, what Information Resources do they rely on: conferences, forums, or business social networks?

What brand do they usually buy their needs from?

What challenges and problems do they have that you can solve?

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Conclusion

As you can see, designing a suitable persona is very important for the development of your work. So get to work now and create a persona based on your current customers. After preparing the mental persona, prepare a questionnaire and send it to your customers and website users, don't forget to include a discount code for those who complete the questionnaire.

Using other information gathering methods will help you design a better persona, and as a result, you will avoid creating a negative persona as much as possible.