Key Takeaways:
Understand the “what” and “why” of personas
Learn two key benefits of using them for your business
Discover the best resource you can use to make personas the easy way
So, you know your business’s target audience. Great! But have you taken the necessary next step and broken down this larger target audience into subgroups to fine-tune your marketing efforts? That’s where personas come in.
What Are Personas?
Personas are detailed definitions or classifications of specific groups of your customers. They go beyond simple demographics to really put a face to these groups in your mind. Personas help you and your team better understand these groups’ motives in making purchasing decisions — and how they interact with your business in the real and digital worlds.
Personas are detailed definitions or classifications of specific groups of your customers. They go beyond simple demographics to really put a face to these groups.
Why Use Personas?
Two of the most obvious reasons to use personas for your small business are to improve targeting and messaging.
Better Targeting
When leveraging personas to boost your brand’s targeting, you’ll first want to make sure you’re on the platforms these specific groups are on. Next, use targeting factors that may seem unrelated to your product/service but hit the right persona. Say you’re a restaurant, but you’ve identified a persona of young professionals. Your goal is to get more of them to come into your restaurant on their lunch break. Targeting around organizations they follow like Nerd Wallet or Entrepreneur would be an excellent strategy to test.
Better Messaging
Personas can, and should, inform your business’s messaging. Work in elements of your story that connect with the personas you’ve identified. Weave it into your website, blogs, social captions, eblasts, ads, and short-form videos.
With regards to content strategy, capitalize on trends that speak to the personas (and avoid those that miss the mark). For example, People & Culture Collective seeks to connect companies with open tech and sales roles with the most qualified candidates. This TikTok leverages a recent trend using a sound clip from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada” because they’ve identified that there is a persona of employees who aren’t into the corporate ladder system. This group would rather be responsible for their own work and would prefer not to manage people.
Personas can, and should, inform your business’s messaging. Work in elements of your story that connect with the personas you’ve identified.
How to Identify & Use Personas
Ready to start channeling personas for your business? While you could spend hours online reading what all of the marketing pros say about making personas, we’ve done the homework for you. Simply download the Technology Therapy® Group Personas guide. It explains personas and their multiple benefits in further detail (and in plain English). And it has step-by-step templates you need to define and establish personas for your business. (Because every business’s personas are unique and it’s time to start understanding the quirks and qualities of yours!)
