I’m going to let you in on a little secret: good marketing doesn’t just happen. It takes some digging and discovery before you can really get to the doing part of things. And one of the foundational elements that comes out of this excavation process is a solid understanding of who the heck it is you’re talking to.

This is where audience personas shine.

Personas are semi-fictional profiles of your ideal customer. Rooted in market research and current customer information, they can include a variety of demographic, psychographic and channel use data that can be used to craft more effective and strategic messaging.

Why Do Personas Matter?

While there’s a great deal of creativity that goes into marketing, it’s a surprisingly research-based practice. 

Just like you might analyze your market to gain a deeper understanding of how to price your goods or services, you can analyze your audience to gain a better understanding of how to convert them to customers. What personas do is take all of this audience insight and distill it into a cohesive and concise profile. 

By thinking of your potential customer base as a handful of individuals rather than a large group, you can better and more efficiently craft content, messaging and campaigns that move that proverbial needle.

What Goes Into an Audience Persona?

A good audience persona helps you clearly visualize who you’re talking to. While research-based, it should feel like a real person with their unique personalities, habits, goals and frustrations. With that in mind, a persona should include:

• A unique identifier.
• Personal demographics.
• A narrative summary of how they got to their current point in their buyer’s journey.
• A quote that captures their personality.
• Personality attributes, including affinities and motivations.
• The goals they seek to achieve in seeking out your goods or services.
• The frustrations they’ve encountered with other things they’ve tried or considered.
• Any affinities they have for other brands.
• Their technology use and social media engagement.

How Do I Make a Persona?

Building a good audience persona takes a lot of information – and that information needs to be digested and understood in order to be useful to you. Not sure what that looks like? No worries; we gotchu, fam. We’ve created this editable persona template to help you organize your data and visualize your audience – and we’ll even show you how to use it.

[DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE PERSONA TEMPLATE]

While some of the basis of your persona can come from intuition and familiarity with your business, sometimes it takes an outside perspective to dig in, poke around and uncover the nuggets of truth that you need to really flesh it out – that’s where we come in.

From stakeholder interviews to mass surveys, we can do the tedious work of uncovering your audience insights. Heck, we’ll even wrap it up in a nice little persona profile like this one. Just give us a call or shoot us an email to learn more about our market research and consulting capabilities.

Since you’ve been so good this year – trust us, we’ve made our list and checked it twice – we want to give you something extra special: 12 Days of Zizzmas. Each business day between December 16 and 31, we’ll be posting a new piece of real, actionable insight designed to make the New Year your year. So check back daily and don’t be afraid to drop a comment if you like what you’ve read.

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