Marketing personas: why would you need them?

Marketing persona consists of basic information about our potential recipient or client. Importantly, it should be a representative of our target group. Depending on our possibilities, personas can be created based on analytical data and research, or on our own ideas. In the latter case, we are talking about proto-personas. 

The main purpose of creating marketing personas is to create the right, tailored communication. The moment we create a persona, along with its name, age, work, earnings, details of interests, character, and life problems, it will be much easier for us to imagine who we are talking to. Thanks to this, we will reach our potential clients much better and transfer our communication to a higher level.

 

Does it mean that when we define a persona that has two children aged 4 and 5, it means that we focus only on customers who meet this condition? Of course not (although we've really heard such questions before). Persona is supposed to be a kind of avatar of the target group, its ideal representative who will make us feel who we are talking to.

 

Another value of creating personas is significantly facilitating the process of introducing new people in the team to what we do. If we hire a new employee, instead of telling him inaccurately who we are addressing our services to, we can present him with specific profiles of our potential clients.

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

 

In all seriousness, of course, we should not limit ourselves to one persona, because it would be difficult for one person to represent all our target groups at the same time. When it comes to the ceiling, we should still be able to have all of the personas we created in the back of our minds when we create marketing content. If you feel like you're getting lost and you don't remember half of them - you probably made too many. When there are, for example, 20 of them, I am afraid that it would be difficult to comprehend the human mind. 

There are quite a few approaches to creating personas and you can easily find them on the Internet. However, they all revolve around similar themes 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 ways to create a persona. Their level of complexity also differs, depending on what the persona is for. Sometimes there are different types of personas, 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 is the so-called anti-personas, depicting someone who will not become our client, yet at the same time may become the recipient of our communication. With anti-persona defined, we can try to create communication in a way that will not be interesting to them.

 

For a better understanding of this, let's imagine that we run a car showroom and want to create a marketing campaign, promoting the fact that in our showroom you can test the latest, sports model of our brand. Although such an opportunity would surely interest many automotive enthusiasts, we only care about those who won't only test the car but also are potential buyers. On the other hand, we want to avoid people who cannot buy a car (e.g. due to its price) but are surely willing to have a free ride. They can cause a real cost to the company, but they are never a potential buyer. 

The main question is 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 a lot of reports and data on groups that may be your potential customers. If you search for "Who buys clothes online", you will find that quite a few institutions have tried to answer this question and are willing to share their results.

 

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

 

The last way I wanted to write about is just .. our gut. How, according to our intuition, we imagine a given persona. Usually, this gut feeling is just the result of our experiences and meeting these types of people on our way. Therefore, it is worth referring to specific people we know here. For example, if we direct our website to lawyers, and we ourselves know two people from this profession very well, although it is not the ideal size of a research group, we can have quite a lot of accurate observations and conclusions.