There are many ways to name them: buyer personas, marketing personas, target, customer type, public audience, audience, users, buyers and so on. These are abstract models created to represent the ideal customer. Their definition is useful to internalize the subject type to attract and relate.

For many departments of a company, like marketing, content, sales and customer relations, practically with everything that has to do with the acquisition and retention, is essential to understand their own marketing personas.

Customer Profiling obviously increases the sales and, as a matter of fact, trying to sell your own product without understanding the ideal customer, is like driving with your eyes closed. You might take the right way, but the chances of success wouldn’t be easily repeatable.

How to Create a Marketing Personas?

Seems difficult, but it isn’t. Start asking questions to those who know the company better than others. An efficient way to gather information about your own clients, is to deliver surveys periodically. Depending on your business sector it can be identified a minimum of 1/3 personas up to 20 personas, number that shouldn’t scare you. By gathering information, you will notice all those subjects with interest in your business. The number of marketing personas must be big enough to include the majority of your clients, but equally small to keep its features.

Give a generic name to your marketing personas (to familiarize) and define the answers to topics such as:

• What is the background of the personas (family, career, education, ..)
• Define its role in the company
• What are its expectations about your product? Which is the “problem” to resolve and what goals to achieve. Focus on the first and second level goals.
• Add to its profile the demographic data at your disposal, at business level are important the geolocation and turnover.
• Which are the preferences on personal communication methods?
• Which are the reticences that can keep the personas away from a possible purchase?
• Which are the alternatives to your product that the personas takes into account?

How the Marketing Personas can be used in Marketing?

Basically, building the Marketing Personas allows you to create content and messages that may be of interest for the target audience. Knowing your users, helps to customize the marketing for different audience segments. For example, instead of sending the same email to all your database, you can segment it according to the marketing personas and then send tailored messages based on different characterizations.

At a further stage, the marketing personas when combined with the life cycle (eg. the progress in the purchasing process) consent highly targeted messages.

In the acquisition processes as the selection of new prospect contacts, knowing the marketing personas is crucial to the selection of the target. The benchmarks teach us that converting a simple user into lead is easier by responding to its expectations and offering research related content.