Marketing

What are marketing personas?

You have probably heard of marketing personas (or buyer personas as they are otherwise known).  The purpose of creating marketing personas is to paint a picture of the audience you are trying to reach.  Used well it can be great tool for segmentation marketing.  But used poorly it can, unfortunately, end up being a pointless exercise. 

Where do marketing personas come from?

Whilst many of us may have seen the end result, it is often not entirely clear how these personas were created, or even by whom.

Perhaps a group of sales and marketing people huddle together in a workshop and “brainstorm” a bunch of personas. 

Or perhaps they were created based on some focus groups that some of your marketing team had commissioned. 

Or maybe they were developed from insights generated from a larger scale quantitative market research survey.  Or perhaps all of these. 

How they were created does matter.  They should of course, be based on a broad group of real actual customers – and not just plucked out of the air based on a customer meeting that one person had with a single customer!

How do they help?

They allow us to bring to life different segments of our market and, in doing so, allow us to better target them and serve their needs. Or do they?

“Segments must be Measurable, Substantial, Accessible, Differentiable, and Actionable.”

Philip Kotler

Unfortunately, sometimes, people can go through a lengthy exercise in creating fancy personas only to find that they aren’t of much actual use.  They can look good.  They look as though they make sense.  You can even bring them to life with infographics, videos and swish artwork.  That’s all cool … but what use are they?

When such an exercise goes wrong you can end up with something that looks very impressive but is hard to relate to any of the questions or challenges that your business actually faces. 

But it doesn’t have to be like that.  Done right, marketing personas can be an extremely powerful business tool. 

So how do you get it right?

Make sure you start with some clear business objectives

First things first.  You must always start with a good reason why you want to create marketing personas in the first place.

That of course means you need to start some tangible business questions.

Obvious questions usually include the following:

• Who is most likely to buy our products?
• What makes them buy?
• How do we reach them?
• What do we need to do to persuade them to buy?

Once you have these questions you then know what you are trying to achieve. Your success criteria for the entire exercise are then clear and simple – can the personas we have created answer our original questions.  Keep these questions clearly in mind throughout the exercise – they are your guiding light and anchor point for the entire project

Do you need them?

An important question to ask before you get too far with generating your personas is:  “Do I even need to generate multiple market personas” ?

Generating multiple market personas implies you are adopting a market segmentation strategy.  That means you want to divide your customers and prospects into different groups and adopt a different marketing approach for each of these groups.

This more targeted approach can bring great rewards. 

But to develop and execute specific campaigns and strategies to address different market segments requires resources.  Not everyone will have the resources or the time to invest in this.

This comes back to our original questions – why are you doing this?

Sometimes, people develop market personas for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes what you really need is something simpler. 

Maybe all you need is a good profile of your target customers and prospects as a single group.  One group of people who you can focus your marketing resources on, directing a specific approach.

In this case you just need a market profile that simply allows you to describe those people who represent good prospects for targeting to your marketing agency in an accurate and meaningful way.

Make sure Personas integrate into your marketing strategy

Although it sounds very obvious, people can sometimes get this wrong and, when they do, generating marketing personas can be a waste of time.

If you decide you need marketing personas then this should form an integral part of your marketing strategy.  The insight you gain from the personas will help you to design a targeted segmentation strategy that will shape and inform your marketing.

You don’t need to generate marketing personas if you have already determined what your strategy will be.  The whole point of creating them is to help formulate your strategy.

Personas are powerful tool for briefing your marketing agency

When you brief a marketing agency, the first thing they will want will be for you to paint a picture of your target audience.  Who are you trying to reach?  What do you need to say to them?

The more they know about the audience the better.  The more specifically they can then target any media campaigns and the more engaging they can make the messaging.

With well crafted and meaningful marketing personas you should be able to provide them with everything they need to create a very targeted and relevant campaign for you.

How do you know your Marketing Personas are any good?

OK, so you have completed the process of pulling together what you need to create your personas.  You believe they will answer the questions you set out at the start of the process.  Now you need to bring them to life and present them to colleagues, to your marketing agency and your partners.

So now you need to create a concise and meaningful guide that explains what these personas are and why they matter.

By this time you may have been working on the project for a few weeks.  So there is a real risk that you, your market research agency and anyone else closely involved might not be able to see the wood for the trees.  So it is worth taking a step back and looking at what you have, to make sure it does indeed give you everything you need.

You can check this by asking a few basic questions:

• Is the Marketing Persona clearly defined and easy to understand?  How easy is it to explain to a colleague who has had no involvement in the project?

• Does it tell you how big/small the market segment it represents actually is?  Is this particular Marketing Persona representative of 50% of your potential market or 5%?

• Does it clearly outline the opportunity that this market segment represents?  Will these people buy from you?  Will it be an easy or a hard sell?  If your salesman is speaking with one of them, what are the chances that you will make a sale?

• Does it tell you what this Persona likes and dislikes?  What kind of things are likely to interest and engage with them?  And what might leave them cold?

• How is this particular Persona different from the other ones?  Can you easily explain why this Persona is different?  What do you need to do differently to engage with this group that you do not need to do with any of the other Personas?

• What media channels should you use to communicate with this Persona and how is this different from the others?

• What kind of marketing messages do you need to design in order to ensure that people in this segment will listen and engage with you?

If you are able to reach a point where your marketing personas can be used to provide meaningful and actionable answers to each of these questions, then you know you have created something of real value.

About Synchronix

Synchronix is a full-service market research agency.  We believe in using market research to help our clients understand how best to prepare for the future.  That means understanding change – whether that be changes in technology, culture, attitudes or behaviour. 

If you are looking to create market personas, we can provide a market segmentation services that you enable you to generate these in a structured and successful way.  You can read more about how we do this on our website.