Personas Make Your Marketing Stronger
By: Dana Ditomaso
Tags: Research, Marketing, Google Analytics, Personas, Digital Marketing

What’s a Persona?

Personas have undeservedly gotten a bad rap from some parts of the digital marketing world, because of poor implementation. Let’s be clear — personas must be based on fact, not fiction. If you use real data to determine your audience segments and then narrow down to a persona from there, you will end up with strong, impactful personas. These data-backed personas empower you and your team to measure the actual impact each of your personas has on your marketing budget.

If you didn’t create personas correctly, you’ll end up arguing over whether or not your persona is male or female, or which stock photo best sums up the happy-go-lucky millennial that you’re trying to capture. You will be guessing and assuming, and you know what happens when you assume!

Personas are a tool informed by data and research that define a specific segment of your market.

When developed properly, personas are not:

Characters for your next great novel.

Your buddy Gord who really likes your products.

Difficult to measure.

You Are Not the Target Market

You’re nodding your head right now saying to yourself, yes, yes, I’ve heard this before — big deal. But let’s say it again: you are not the target market.

Your marketing is for your personas, not for you. Their motivations matter, not yours. When you are reviewing creative or copy, you’re not reviewing it for you — put on your persona’s clothes and shoes and evaluate things from their position. Just because a tagline sounds great to you doesn’t mean it will mean anything to your audience!

E verything thing you do, you do it for your personas.

What Makes a Persona Good?

When you have a good persona, your boss will start nodding their head in agreement when you begin describing the persona. They know this persona! They can picture several of your current clients who match this persona perfectly.

The second important piece is that the persona must be findable and measurable. By findable, we mean that there is a way to target that persona specifically; by measurable, we mean that there is a plan on to segment and track that persona.

The Role of Research in Marketing

If you are guessing you will end up failing. Put that on a poster with a rainbow and hang it up in every marketing and advertising agency in the world.

Empathy. Empathy. Empathy. How many times have you heard or read that word this week? It gets thrown around a lot, in the same way that eye-roll worthy words like “authentic” and “unique” and “passionate” often do. But what is empathy?

Empathy is a key characteristic of a successful marketer, and it’s also what separates an okay persona from a good one. Empathy is what lets you become one of your personas and discover what real world things actually affect that part of your audience.

Don’t make assumptions about empathy — do research to discover what empathy actually means for the people you want to connect with. Collecting demographic statistics about age, gender, and income doesn’t produce empathy. Relying on this type of data alone leads to assumptions and “personas” like this:

Taken from an actual document an award-winning agency presented to a client of ours before they parted ways.

You need to go beyond this. Ask questions that educate you about who your audience is beyond just simple demographics (that your competitors likely have the exact same access to).

The Canadian magazine Chatelaine does a special feature called “This is 40ish”, where they interview Canadian women between 35 and 45. The questions cover a wide range of topics, including “are you a feminist?” and “do you look good naked?”.

Here are some answers to the question “what makes you unique?”:

Even these tiny story snippets build empathy. You know these 40ish women a little bit better now. Empathy changes people on your website from just numbers on a screen to real people who are affected by your marketing decisions.

Why Personas Make People Nervous

You will get pushback when you suggest developing specific personas for your company — especially from people who are used to the idea that you buy a billboard, 80,000 cars drive past every day and then maybe a couple of people will be interested and visit your website or pick up the phone.

If you can narrow down your audience to 1,000 people who reflect who your best client is, and then talk directly to those people in the method that works best for them instead of putting up a billboard and hoping for the best… well, it’s easy to see how that could potentially affect your marketing budgets and results.

W hen you engage in persona marketing, you end up spending less money on spray and pray marketing techniques.

Your budget is then available to invest in the channels and messages that your personas are actually paying attention to. To put this another way, if your website conversion rate is only 3%, that means that you’re failing 97% of your visitors.

Only in marketing are we allowed to have a 97% fail rate and call it a success.

How to Build a Persona

Put together a list of your best clients. What do these clients have in common? If you are a new business and don’t have current clients to lean on, talk to the clients of your competitors. Please email us if you want to discuss how to effectively make these people feel valued and willing to assist you.

Investigate Social Media

What do these clients share and where do they hang out? If you don’t already know their social media profiles, you can use FullContact to get their profile information using their email address. You don’t need to be a programmer to get this data, either — they have an Excel spreadsheet you can use. All you need to is sign up for an API key.

If your clients are on Twitter, use BuzzSumo to learn what they tweet about. Use their Influencer search and search for their Twitter @username — for example, if you wanted to view my information, you would search for @danaditomaso, and this is what you would see: