Personas are the imaginary friends of marketers. By defining specific personalities within the otherwise anonymous target audience they allow precise content targeting. With the help of personas all initiatives can be evaluated in terms of their potential to add value for the target audience.
Personas are fictional representatives of your target audience. Comprehensive background information is gathered around those archetypes – from their relationship status to their diet, from income levels to political views, from professional aspirations to personal challenges. Depending on the industry at hand the personas are defined in different aspects of their personality and lifestyle.
In any case the personas has a name, a face, a demographic background, a career path, a private life and – above all – goals, needs and challenges. This kind of concretization breaks down an anonymous target audience into individual personalities who become understandable and approachable.
When working with market research data, the people in the target group are often hidden by figures. As a marketing manager it is easy to lose sight of the personalities behind the veil of statistics. But developing user-friendly product-/service- and information-offers sure is difficult if one does not know said users.
The greatest value of working with personas lies in its identification potential for all who design service offers and communication strategies, or contribute to their implementation in any way – that is to say: basically for all and everyone. Every single one, to be exact. The biggest benefit of thinking in terms of personas comes their function as a reference point in all business decisions – as negligible as they may seem. If all employees check their decisions for relevancy to the target group, customer-centered management becomes a reality.
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Working with personas is of particular importance to those companies that do not directly sell to end consumers, as for example in the healthcare industry. The distance from the user entails the risk of miscommunicating to the target group. Personas prevent this by giving decision-makers an understanding of the goals and needs of the target audience.
Particularly in the healthcare industry, personas are helpful to demonstrate different symptoms and courses of diseases, and connect them to the people affected by them. The persona-based approach considers the holistic life situation of patients and thereby picks up disease patterns that patients might not even be aware of.
Depending on the industry environment it makes sense to define 4-6 personas. From the experienced office administrator who seeks to be reemployed after the maternity leave to the recently divorced head of customer service in search for deeper meaning – each persona stands for an archetype in your target group and is defined in their characteristic needs, goals and challenges. Our experience has proven the following approach to be particularly effective:
In the beginning, give your persona a name. This helps to establish a human connection und makes it easier to re-identify and remember specific personas later on in the process. Needless to say that Martina Reemployed and Carl Single-Again are catchier names than Persona 1 and 2.
Try to create a multi-faceted personality around your persona and define their life situation to make them as vivid as possible. Make sure to specify at least the following traits:
The last step is about merging your insights. The objective is to offer relevant content with value-added to your persona via those channels and in those formats, that turned out to be appropriate in your analysis of their user behavior.
There is a myriad of sources of information for persona-related data – from socio-demographic studies up to focus groups. These are the most important ones:
When we define personas with our clients we always follow the same approach. We use a guideline to collect information about the life situation of the persona as described above. Based on the experience of the projects we realized in this area, we developed an optimized guide to holistically define personas and make their personalities approachable. You can download the template we use for that purpose here.
Talking about target groups without having specific personas in mind is very much like talking about colours when you’re actually blind – the validity of your statement may be questionable. However, you don’t need to navigate blindly through the marketing world. Let your imaginary friends guide you. It pays off to trust them! Because: As fictional as the persona may be, as real is the value that they add.
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