Stay aHead: Persona marketing
27 Jan 2015
Leah Kendall
Stay aHead
It’s time to stop creating content for the masses.
In an era where consumers expect everything to be personalised from their advertising to their trainers, the most successful businesses are moving away from a one size fits all approach and learning to tailor their content to hyper-targeted audiences.
They are also adjusting their approach on a campaign-by-campaign basis rather than sticking to a rigid brand look and feel.
How are they doing it? Persona marketing.
Remember this?
Quite simply, persona marketing helps you understand and connect with your audience. It tells you what motivates them and what their interests are, and helps you build a clearer picture of their needs. When brands initially start to think about their target audience, they’re often happy with broad demographic profiles (single, male, age 18-25), but these are rarely expanded down the line.
The reality is: they just don’t cut it.
Creating a basic persona involves sourcing information from several key areas: Demographic (age, income, gender), Geographic, Psychographic (lifestyle, attitudes, beliefs), Behavioural (usage, how they interact with your content). The beauty of our big data society is that you can build this information quite easily through social listening, site analytics and many other existing data points.
By creating personas and giving them a face, brands can relate to customers as human beings, and if you can better understand their needs and interests you can better serve them content.
Think of it like buying someone the perfect present. Come Mother’s Day, you visualise your mum in your head as you shop. You imagine the things she loves, the things she hates, what she already has, and what she needs and wants. The same concept, applied to marketing, allows you to produce personalised content that resonates with your audience.
We’re a big fan of personas here at 1000heads. Creating personas is a great exercise in understanding your audience, and it helps maintain focus when creating content, whether that’s blog posts, videos, or infographics.
One good way to have your team keep their personas at the forefront of campaign planning and content curation is to produce cut outs or wall-mounted mood boards so they have a real physical presence in the office.
Hungry for more? Check out the below.
Buffer’s beginners guide to marketing personas
Nathalie Nahai’s Slideshare: The Psychology of Persuasive Content for “Boring” Industries