Marketing personas: why would you need them?

Persona is otherwise basic information about our potential recipient or client. Importantly, it is a profile of a representative of our target group. Depending on what possibilities we have, personas can be created based on analytical data and research, or on our own imagination. In the latter case, we are talking about proto-personas. 

The main goal of creating personas is to help create the right communication. The moment we create a persona, along with their name, age, job, salary, details about interests, character and life problems, it will be much easier for us to imagine who we are writing to. Thanks to this, we will reach our potential client much better and take our communication to a higher level.

 

Does this mean that if we define a persona that has two children aged 4 and 5, we are only targeting customers who meet this condition? Of course not (although we have heard such questions before). A persona is supposed to be a kind of avatar of the target group, its ideal representative, who will allow us to feel who we are addressing.

 

Another value of creating personas is that it significantly facilitates the process of introducing new people to the team in what we do. If we hire a new employee, instead of telling them incoherently who we are directing our services to, we can present them with precise profiles of our potential customers.

Another frequently asked question is how many personas we should create. The answer is clear: not too few and not too many 😉

 

Seriously, of course we shouldn't limit ourselves to one persona, because it would be difficult for one person to represent all our target groups at once, of which there are usually more than one. As for the upper limit, there should be so few personas that we would be able to figure them out and remember them while creating communication. At a point when there are, for example, 20 of them, I'm afraid it would be difficult for the human mind to grasp it. 

To be honest, there are quite a few approaches to creating personas and you can easily find them on the Internet. However, they all revolve around similar topics and elements. Below you will find the elements that we define when creating personas in KomuKoncept:

 

AGE: 

INCOME: 

CHILDREN (HOW MANY, AGE): 

 

 

 

 

As I mentioned, there are many more recipes for personas, and their level of complexity also varies depending on what the persona is intended for. Sometimes, different types of personas are distinguished, such as marketing, UX, product or user personas. The people who buy our product are not always the ones for whom the product is designed. 

 

One of the most interesting types of personas are the so-called anti-personas, or depictions of someone who will not become our client (or we do not want them to become), but at the same time may become the recipient of our communication. By creating anti-personas, we can try to limit the participation of these people in our audience.

 

To better understand the situation, let's imagine that we run a car showroom and want to create a campaign based on the possibility of testing the latest, sports model of our brand. This is a topic that will certainly interest many car enthusiasts, but we want a premium customer who will not only test the car itself, but also potentially want to buy it. We want to avoid people who cannot buy a car (e.g. due to its price), but would be very happy to take advantage of the opportunity for a free ride. 

The basic question is of course where to get all this information about our potential customers. The best way is of course research, both quantitative and qualitative. Classic desk research with the help of Uncle Google is also useful. On the Internet you will find many reports and studies about groups that may be your potential recipients. If you search, for example, "Who buys clothes online", it will turn out that quite a few institutions have already tried to answer this question and are happy to share their results.

 

Other good places to look for information are analytical systems, such as Google Analytics or Facebook analytics. If you have already taken on the market, have stable traffic on your website, and a solid number of fans on Facebook, then you can extract a lot of information from these two sources.

 

The last method I wanted to write about is simply... our gut feeling. That is, how, according to our intuition, we imagine a given person. Usually, this gut feeling is simply the result of our experiences and meeting this type of person on our path. That is why it is worth referring here to specific people we know. For example, if we direct our service to lawyers, and we know two people in this profession very well, then although it is not an ideally sized research group, we can have quite a few accurate observations and conclusions.