A question we faced with frequenty: What is a persona in Digital Marketing.
A ‘persona’ is a profile that represents a particular group of people, for example, customers, employees and other stakeholder groups. It is important to recognise that this is under no circumstances a stereotype, but more of an archetype based on a company’s research of their audience.
Even though Personas are fictional characters, they help people with similar service needs that the persona has and makes finding what they’re looking for on a website more understandable and enjoyable.
It is also key to know about negative personas, this isn’t the mean girl in high school or the horrible power-thirsty boss you once had but is simply just a negative, semi-fictional rendition of a company’s less than ideal customers. These could include professionals who are too advanced for your product, students who won’t buy anything off you but will use your knowledge as research which won’t make you any money or profit, or customers who are just too expensive for you as a company.
Why does a Persona matter?
- Build Long-lasting Trust – Digital Personas matter mainly for customer experience and service. When someone is looking into a product, service or business, people instinctively gravitate towards websites they know they can trust and are familiar with, it puts them at ease knowing what they are using is reliable and customer friendly.
- Product/Service Development & Improvements – if you know your ideal (and non-ideal) customer type inside out, this will give you great insight into how the services/products you supply need to adapt to remain on-trend and interesting to that specific sect of the customer. Companies that fail to realise who their customers actually are will fail to keep pace in today’s quick-moving markets.
- Improve Marketing Effectiveness – knowing your personas and customer types can dramatically amplify marketing efforts. Marketing, be in paid Search, paid social, conferences etc will be vastly more effective if they are created around personas.
- Improve UX, UI and Digital Experiences – Who your customers are and what Digital persona they fit in with will massively affect how your website, the mobile application should be built. Online presence is so vital in this day and age with websites now fundamentally acting as the new era’s shop front window and so it’s paramount that it resonates with your customers.
How are digital Personas used practically in Digital Marketing?
First of all, ask yourself about your ideal customer, research that particular demographic, then everything else follows.
Digital Personas allow you to create content and messages to your ideal target audience and customers that appeal to them. It then enables you to target and personalise your marketing for different segments of your audience. So, get to know your audience well and use it to your advantage.
Often, Personas are given names, to humanise them and make them more relatable to your customers, this is great because the persona can act as if it is a role model for customers to take advice from and they get the idea that as a company you understand customer needs.
Use Google Analytics Data, Google Ads Data and Facebook Data – they all have astronomical amounts of data about almost everyone that comes into contact with these platforms, making them not only the perfect advertisement tool but also the perfect tools to begin identifying your digital personas and negative digital personas.
- PPC – Pay-per-click performance be it on Facebook, Google Ads or Bing Ads can be vastly improved by creating audiences from pre-defined personas. Rather than simply taking a stab in the dark in your audience’s demographics, interests & behaviours, a persona equipped digital marketer can precisely, effectively and quickly target their adverts as best possible to their target market. It’s paramount to have Digital Personas ironed out prior to instigating any form of PPC campaign if you wish to experience high-performing PPC services.
- Content – The Content you share will resonate much more with your audiences if curated around well-defined personas – a crucial factor for any business with an online presence in this day and age! Content created around Digital Personas will resonate with audiences more, increase engagement, increase exposure through amplified sharing and thus improve SEO, traffic, lead generation and ultimately sales. Quality content really is absolutely key, and creating it around personas is a surefire way to make sure it hits the right notes.
So, when looking at everything we have talked about above, we now go back to our question; What is a Persona in Digital Marketing? Well, it’s an extraordinary digital marketing tool that requires extensive research from pre-existing digital data, in order to get to know our audience, ideal customers and non-ideal customers inside it. This information, if gathered and extrapolated effectively, can lead to some truly astounding results across any business in areas such as Website UX, Paid Social Media Marketing, Google Ads, content curation and much more.
Identify your personas and take your business to new levels.
What is a persona in digital marketing? Written by Amelia Dean
