Audience personas can help you gain insight from your audience on matters of segmentations, where to focus your time, which products to develop, how to write your copy, marketing messages and more. It’s probably one of the more important marketing tactics that you can do if you really want to be successful with your audience. To develop an audience persona, follow these steps.
* Know Your Competition – There is someone who sells something like you do to the same audience who is successful. Get to know all you can about them and their audience because it’ll help you understand your audience even better. Sign up for their newsletters, go to their groups, and interact with the customers.
* Conduct a SWOT Analysis – Your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats don’t just exist within you; they also exist outside of you and aren’t always under your control. However, if you can analyze the situation you might be able to figure out how to lessen the impact or even prevent it to start with.
* Interview Your Current Customers – If you already have customers it’s a good idea to get to know them because if a person bought, a persona modeled after the satisfied and happy buyer can end up making you a boatload of money in the end. You can interview them via email, or invite them to call and leave a message.
* Look At User Data on Google Analytics – It’s imperative to install Google Analytics to your website. If you’re not sure how to do it, find an expert. You’ll learn everything you can about your audience and those who are clicking, reading and interacting. The information can be used to improve your customer relations as well as your marketing materials.
* Conduct a Survey – If you have no audience yet but you know who you want to be your audience, you can use Facebook ads to circulate a survey to help you create your audience personas in such a way that it’s an accurate depiction of your ideal customer.
* Answer These Questions – It’s important to make up the answers to these questions based on the research you’ve conducted up to this point. You can go very far with your persona to include hair color, sex, and more. It’s up to you how much you want to include so that you can get a picture of one of your potential customers that is very clear.
# Name – What’s their name?
# Age – How old are they?
# Employment – What is their job title?
# Income – How much do they make and more importantly, how much disposable income do they have?
# Family – What is their status?
# Values – What do they care most about?
# Fears – What keeps them up at night?
# Acting emotions – Some people act on fear; others act on having their heart strings pulled.
# Who do they trust? – They read, listen to, and follow someone that makes them feel good.
A good tool to use to create the picture of your audience persona is Canva.com. You can use their layouts and images to help you create a good example of your audience member. Once you do this, you’ll use this persona to develop all your marketing materials as well as your products and services.