The purpose of creating a marketing persons is to appeal to the right people who will most likely be interested in your product or services. Most people make the mistake of trying to appeal to “everyone” by making their target audience too broad, which actually puts them in danger of appealing to no one. In fact, a narrowly-defined audience can still contain a wide variety of different types of people. For instance, if your target audience is “female millennial college students in urban areas” this can include: business majors, electricians, studious homebodies, social butterflies, part-time and full-time students, etc.
After creating a target audience, you will need to create an audience persona. Personas are fictional profiles that represent groups of similar people within a target audience. The reason personas are crucial to your marketing campaign is because they help you figure out how to reach people on a more personal level, through your messages, offers, and products.
Now that you know the importance of having a specific target audience and what marketing personas are; let’s discuss how you can successfully use personas in your marketing to empathize with your audience.
Research and Ask Questions
After defining your target audience’s general makeup e.g. “avid book readers” or “sports car enthusiasts under 40”, the next step is to research your audience. This is your opportunity to get know everything there is know about them through interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Other key questions to ask yourself while conducting your research are:
- What are their favourite activities?
- What are their professional and personal ambitions?
- What makes them anxious?
- Describe their personality
- What is their perspective towards life?
- What items can’t they live without?
- What does a typical day entail? (what time do they wake up in the morning and what time do they get home?)
- How do they get to work or school?
- What meals do they eat? Are there any diet restrictions?
- What are their hobbies?
- What drives them to try a new product or service?
The whole purpose of your research and questions is to get as specific and gather as much information as you can about your target audience.
Look for Similarities
After you have conducted your research, interviews, surveys, and focus groups, the next step is to group people together who had similar responses and create a fictional audience persona to represent each group.
For example, a bank who provides insurance for life, travel, health, dental, and investment options might use these personas: the social butterfly student who knows nothing about investments and insurance, the single mother who balances her home and work life, and the family man who wants to be financially secure. Although most people possess a variety of characteristics, your goal is to group people based on their most dominant trait displayed during your audience research.
This is where your interview questions in research should be used to fully complete each persona in detail. Therefore, describe their ambitions, anxieties, a typical day, and so on. When creating personas, you want to make them as “real” as possible, so assign a photo and a fictional first name. Also, finding a quote that sums up what each persona stands for will make it easy to reference back when creating your marketing campaigns. The bank might use these names and quotes:
Robbie, the young social butterfly: “I want to travel the world and make memories. I’m too young to think about investments and insurance.”
Maria, the single mother: “I want to invest my hard earned money for my son’s future but I don’t know how.”
Nick, the family man: “I want to invest my money for mine and my children’s future. I also want to be a homeowner.”
Establish Your Journey Map
A journey map is a visualization of the projected path your personas might take. Your maps should include important moments and touchpoints such as: where, when, and how do your personas discover, buy, and use your product or service.
Let’s use the bank’s persona of Robbie, the young social butterfly. The touchpoints on Robbie’s journey map might be:
1. He is planning a trip with his friends.
2. He searches online for travel insurance.
3. He finds the bank’s website.
4. He browses through travel insurance options.
5. He makes an appointment at the bank.
6. He goes to the appointment and purchases the travel insurance.
At each touchpoint, it is important for the bank to map out how its business and marketing intends to interact with Robbie. This includes search ads, landing pages, how easy was it for Robbie to book an appointment, meet with a representative, how long did he have to wait, and the overall experience and enjoyment of the bank’s services.
Use Empathy to Make it Personal
In order to effectively use empathy in your marketing, you must first create an empathy map to help you better understand the challenges your persona might encounter when interacting with your product of services. Best of all, it helps you create better solutions.
To create an empathy map, follow these three steps:
1. Create a hypothetical situation
2. Formulate how your persona might feel during the situation
3. Brainstorm ways your product or service could help your persona overcome these challenges
The goal of marketing personas is to get to know your audience on a deeper level so that your brand can appeal to each and every one of them.
