Any service or product is developed for a particular audience. Regardless of their profile, you must know them to grab their attention. But you already know it. Right? The real question is: how can you know them?
One of the most efficient ways to reach your target audience comes from a study of personas. In this article, we will look at it in detail and show you how this methodology works, as long as it follows a strategic planning tool as a guide to outline and develop the business models.
Understanding the Concept of Personas
The very first step before applying any technique is to understand the meaning of what you will be doing. According to Wikipedia, personas are presented as some fictional characters developed to represent the different type of users within a target audience, attitude, and/or behavior set that could use a site, a mark, or any other similar product.
This is a study, research, a methodology to create the profile of your target audience to make sure that your marketing strategy is hitting the mark of who has an interest in your services. This presents more opportunities for cross-selling, a better understanding of consumers, and an exceptional ability to direct personalized communication to your potential customers.
In short, it’s a way to customize your e-mail marketing campaign by segmentation. Creating personas is linked to all data collected from consumers that are divided into groups as per similar preferences. For example, if you work with fashion e-commerce, you can develop personas for jeans-lovers, for the most updated in the latest fashion trends, or for those who like to combine accessories in a casual style.
This way, you can send more targeted e-mail for each type of customer. To help you, we here point three initial steps, which will be the basis for communication and marketing strategy with the help of personas segmentation.
Make a Survey or an Interview with Your Customers
Surveys or interviews can yield valuable feedback from customers. When you prepare particular relevant questions for a single person, the information collected is more in-depth and more detailed. One way to apply this analysis to practice is by the partnership between the e-mail manager and SurveyMonkey.
The questions differ according to the market you work for. We compiled a list of topics that can be explored to help you create multiple personas:
- How did they find your business? (Internet,
- Reference, social networks, word-of-mouth, advertising)
- Why did they choose your company? (Price, , product, customer service)
- Their company/business information. (Size, industry)
- Demographic information. (Age, gender, income …)
- Location.
- What are the challenges your client faces?
- What problem your service or product can solve for him/her?
These are some example questions that can be raised so that you have a position to start creating personas for each product or service of your company. But what comes next?
Immerse Yourself in the Analysis of their Responses
By bringing together the answers to the questions, you already have all the necessary material at hand. From this point on, begin to refine. With the collected data, divide them into various groups according to the profile. The more similarities remain together while others are grouped separeately.
From doing this, you’ll begin to see a pattern of behavior through features in common, which will start shaping your persona profiles.
The second stage, however, doesn’t end here. THerefore keep monitoring them constantly because consumer preferences may change, and the personas should follow each change.
Gathering the Features and Create Your Personas
To start with, you don’t need to limit yourself to just one persona. We recommend you to create 3 to 5. Then, prepare the pen and paper or if you prefer, find a computer. Search or draw a template for your personas, just like the image we have used to illustrate this article.
The document must contain a space for photos and some fields for you to fill with the information collected.
- Who is the customer? (Name, age, region, job, hobbies …)
- Reasons for using your service or product?
- Reasons to buy your service or product?
- Interests?
- Personality?
- Skills?
- Dreams?
- Motivations? What concerns them?
- Frustrations?
- Their relationship with … (area of their businesses)
This research is a part of the strategic planning tool developed to outline the business models. Business Model Canvas, or Canvas, is a pre-formatted visual map with blocks, which may present the above-listed ideas to help shape the concepts of your business.
These spaces can be customized as per your needs, so you will have a sketch of the audience type compatible with the service or product you are offering. By using this methodology, you have the chance to meet your target audience in a much efficient way
Inserting the Personas into Your Marketing Planning
Now that you’ve developed your personas, it’s time to fit them in your E-mail marketing strategy. Now create a calendar of actions for each portion of the target audience and track the progress of your e-mail marketing campaign with the personas segmentation.
In addition, keep all processes documented for later analysis and mapping of each step. It will help define the best actions and will also improve each strategy when putting into practice.
We recommend going through a guide prepared by Buffer to learn more about personas. These four steps should help you to understand your target audience better and also show how to reach your audience with the right “solution” to their “problem.”