Marketing persona profile: why and how to create them

Marketing persona profile – identify your potential client

The marketing industry offers many tools that support business. Focusing on potential customers, and getting to know the audience of our offerings, is an essential part of a company’s marketing efforts. The marketing persona profile is designed to help you get closer to the world of the audience of your products and services than ever before.

If you are an entrepreneur, you know that your products and services are meant to reach specific people. These are the people who have the potential to become your customers in the future. That’s why we tailor the offer, and the communication message that follows it, to the profile of our ideal customer.

The term “persona,” is used most often in the marketing industry, but other company’s departments, such as sales or human resources, also use it. The term means a created profile of your dream customer. It is a fictional, but at the same time realistic image of your ideal customer, which represents a specific target group to which you should especially target your offer.

Why is marketing persona profile creation important for business?

A professionally defined user persona is significant for business, because it helps you better understand your customers, and tailor your marketing efforts to their needs and preferences. Here are some of the most important reasons why you should go through the creative process of creating a persona profile:

• Narrow down your marketing efforts – marketing is an industry rich in opportunities. There are many tools to choose from, to increase sales or work on brand image. Knowing the profile of your ideal customer, will help you tailor the right promotion and communication channel, to your audience.
• Getting to know your customers better – in creating a persona, the idea is that the company’s employees know the character of the ideal representative of the target group to which the company goes out with its offer. Answer these questions: who he is, where he lives, what needs he has, and what concerns he has. Company’s communication should, among other things, take into account cracking down on customer concerns, which requires tailoring the message to the target audience. Start by defining the profile of your potential customer, so that your marketing efforts can have the desired effect.
• You’ll strengthen engagement – deepening customer interest and involvement happens by creating a sense, that the company knows him, understands his needs and possible concerns. Then the interested individual is more likely to become a consumer of our goods and services. It is during the process of building relationships with the brand’s audience that the company needs the subject of customer personas.
• You will increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities – define your ideal customer, and you will see the impact it has on conducting marketing activities, aimed at specific groups of customers, and increasing sales in the company. With a customer persona, you will more effectively reach the right people and increase the effectiveness of your marketing activities, like designing marketing campaigns and expanding your reach.
• You’ll save money – after all, the lower the cost of customer acquisition, the better. The budget spent on sales and marketing is not strained, simply because there is a detailed strategy within the company, to prevent this. The example of the persona of an ideal customer, is one of the tools to save time and money on misplaced advertising because of poor targeting.

Yes, not every company chooses to create a customer persona for itself, considering that process essential for its proper marketing or sales activities. Nonetheless, the benefits of creating marketing persona profile, often prove, to be very helpful to the smoothness of various departments within a company and the results of their activities.

I know my target audience, why should I create a persona profile?

Target group and marketing persona profile, although both phrases are used in marketing, have different meanings.

A target audience is a category of people potentially interested in your product or service. We describe the target group based on criteria such as age, gender, place of residence, or income level. To a well-described target group, which we try to narrow down as much as possible, we target a product or service offering.

A marketing persona profile is an ideal model of a client, who represents a specific target group, that we are most interested in. It is a fictional character that describes in detail the potential customer’s needs, concerns, dreams, goals, and preferences. Customer persona help us understand who our clients are, what they expect and what their needs are. This helps us create effective marketing activities, advertise campaigns and finally, translates into greater brand recognition and increased company revenue.

Aspects I should take into consideration when creating marketing persona profile

There are several important aspects, that make up the complete image of our persona.

These are demographics, psychology, or behaviour regarding the customer persona. When creating your marketing persona profile, remember that it must be as realistic as possible, while still uncomplicated, so that everyone working in the company can relate to it and use it. The user persona should be described in a clear and specific way, so that it can be easily remembered as an image of the target customer group.

Keep in mind that the public’s tastes are changing, and accordingly to these changes, we create an ideal customer model. This is both a creative and iterative process, taking into account the changing trends, that occur in the consumer market. To them, we adjust the ideal customer model.

Another significant aspect, is to involve more people in your company in the marketing persona profile creation process. Don’t consider in that process every person you hire, but choose those, whose opinion will be crucial and who should know the profile of such a persona, due to the dimension of their daily work. The right people for this task could be managers, team leaders or people working in sales, marketing or human resources.

I want to create a persona profile, but I don’t know how to do it

If you’re wondering, how to create a marketing persona profile, our answer is that it’s a simple task, but one, that requires creativity and focus. Start at the beginning, that is, by knowing the target audience, you are reaching out to with your offer. Build a user persona by asking yourself the following questions, which you can think of as a simplified persona template:

• Who is your potential customer?
• What gender is he or she?
• What age is he or she?
• Where does he live?
• What does he/she do professionally?
• What are his/her interests?
• What are his/her dreams?
• Does he/she have any concerns?
• What does he/she strive for?
• Channels of communication he/she prefers?
• What might he/she care about when it comes to company’s communication with an audience?

All of these types of questions that you answer, by creating a marketing persona profile, will allow you to narrow down your target audience, as we mentioned before. You will no longer unnecessarily strain your marketing budget, by creating ineffective advertising campaigns.

Creating an ideal customer profile is a creative process, during which, we analyse all the information available to us, about who is on the side of our potential customer. Any kind of observation of the environments and groups we are targeting, will be useful. It’s worthwhile to sprinkle in interviews or surveys, when collecting responses, and then create a marketing persona based on them.

Mistakes you should avoid when creating marketing persona profile

When you create a marketing persona profile, various mistakes can occur. They will result in the fact, that the described customer persona, will not contribute effectively to the marketing activities carried out. Reaching the company’s target group of ideal customers, will be more difficult as a result. Below we list some potential mistakes, that complicate the construction of a marketing persona:

• Creating a marketing persona profile that is too general – this can, although not necessarily, be a problem. The more details you include when creating a customer persona, the better. Otherwise, the subsequent marketing processes and outreach to potential customers, may not be as effective as we would like.
• Stereotyping customer groups – when drawing conclusions about groups and people, and making assumptions about potential customers, we may be tempted to go with stereotypes that are currently being talked about. This will distort the professional final image of our forming image of a particular customer and will result in a negative user persona.
• Lack of diversity – we recommend creating customer persona representing different target groups. After some time, we will see, which one was the right direction, and who is most likely to become the company’s target customer. There are many consumer behaviours and traits to consider, when creating a marketing persona profile.
• Subjective opinion instead of actual data – making marketing decisions based on assumptions, instead of data and facts, can lead to wrong conclusions and ultimately result in a negative user persona. Therefore, an example of a persona is created using real and up-to-date data and research, to get the most accurate picture of customer’s traits and needs.
• Lack of updates – as we mentioned earlier, in the consumer’s market different trends occur. It is worthwhile to constantly monitor this, and stay up-to-date when creating marketing persona profile of potential customers.

Create a persona marketing to support your business

If you are facing the decision of what you can do to support the growth of your business, and so far have not paid much attention to your potential customers, the created marketing persona profile, can become a breakthrough. Some say that creating a marketing persona is an unnecessary activity, according to practitioners of this solution – an invaluable help to any marketer. The ideal customer model is a tool to streamline our daily work on increasing organic reach, as well as paid ones. It will help increase brand recognition or attract new leads.

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