In marketing, the most effective message is the most meaningful message. One way to make messages more meaningful is to segment them by persona. For example, instead of sending the same email to everyone in your database, you can tailor your messaging to different personas.
What is a buyer persona?
At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalize your marketing for different segments of your audience.
Buyer personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.
Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. If you’re new to personas, start small. You can always develop more personas later if needed.
An example of message segmentation by persona
Imagine you sell paintbrushes and you’re introducing a new model called the Awesome Angle Brush. How might you change the messaging to suit different personas? It might look something like this …
Persona #1: Perfectionist Pam
Description: Pam is an independent professional painter. Her primary goal is to do high-quality work so she earns repeat business and referrals. Pam’s primary motivation is pride.
Message: The Awesome Angle Brush is designed for precision. Every stroke lets the quality of your work shine through.
Persona #2: High-volume Hank
Description: Hank is a painting contractor juggling dozens of jobs. His primary goal is to minimize labor costs and time on site for each project. Hank’s primary motivation is profitability.
Message: The Awesome Angle brush is designed for speed and efficiency. It reduces cut-in time by 30-40% per job.
How to identify your buyer personas
The strongest personas are based on market research, as well as on insights you gather from customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.
Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:
- Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.
- Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
- When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if all of your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.
- Take into consideration your sales team’s feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
Once you’ve named your personas, you can start defining them by characteristics such as:
- Demographics
- Buying preferences
- Communication preferences
- Goals
- Motivations
- Challenges
- Potential objections to your product/service
Even if you have just one persona, going through this exercise will help you keep your focus where it needs to be: on connecting with your target audiences, not just talking to them.
- Paige
Paige Moore is the content director for OSD. In addition to being our chief word nerd, she handles site architecture for websites and strategy for content marketing programs.
