Marketing Personas in 6 Easy Steps

Have you developed marketing personas for your customers and prospects? With the multitude of digital marketing options including social media, blogging and email lead generation plans, tailoring your content to make it more relevant to buyers will most likely improve your results. Marketing personas are a great way to get started.

As a small to mid-sized business marketer, no doubt you’re wearing multiple hats and may be short on resources. Follow these steps to start using customer personas to improve your digital marketing results:

1. Start with research. It can be as simple as talking to your customers to get to know their real interests and needs.  Let’s say for example, you sell software to medical practices and your target is a practice manager and a physician. A medical practice manager may be looking for ways to save time, run the front office more efficiently and ways to simplify her job. A physician may be interested in improving patient care and increasing revenue.
2. Identify influencers vs. decision makers.  In the case of marketing technology to a medical practice, you will mostly likely need to go through the practice manager (influencer) to reach the physician (decision maker). Both audiences have different interests and you will want to develop customized and relevant messaging to grab their attention.
3. What challenges do your customers face? In our example, perhaps scheduling patients efficiently, running a profitable practice or fast access to patient information is critical. Ask your customers what their daily challenges are as it relates to your product.
4. How can you solve customer challenges? Once you understand their issues, it’s much easier to develop your marketing offering and message by framing your offering in terms of solutions and benefits that are meaningful to each persona.
5. Demographics. Of course, you’ll want to consider your customer’s gender, education level, age and other factors as part of your writing style to each audience.
6. ​Determine customer communication preferences. Do they consume most of their news and information on social media, if so, where? Search for online topics relevant to your product or service and join the conversation by answering questions, positioning yourself as an expert.

Now that you have your customer personas, take a quick review each time you're developing content and write as though you are speaking to them.  You'll be on your way to more effective marketing.