When you're developing marketing content, your audience may morph into faceless figures, instead of the real, everyday people you're trying to reach.

To engage real people, you need to tailor your messages and incentives to be relevant and personal to their individual needs, address their concerns, demonstrate your value, and persuade them to convert (all at an appropriate time in their purchase cycle and without being too aggressive or annoying).

This personalized value exchange is key - in 2023, 56% of consumers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience, and 62% of business leaders cite improved customer retention as a benefit of personalization efforts.

Ultimately, it's hard to succeed with personalization, if you haven't put in the work to deeply understand your audience.

If your audience picture is a little groggy, gain clarity to fuel your personalization efforts by developing marketing personas.

"At Whereoware, we're all about being customer-centric. We want to understand the clients' goals and their customers' journeys, to delivery hyper personal, relevant, and valuable content, incentives, and overall support. ‍We do this through customer insights, research, behavior, and surveys, and then apply that data to optimization, technology, and marketing."

What are Marketing Personas?

‍Marketing personas are fictional characters representing your core audience, to help you understand their needs and deliver more valuable and personalized outreach.  

Personas help marketers engage individuals with the right approach, timing, and messaging to help them achieve their goals and move them down the conversion path.

How to Build Actionable Marketing Personas

The goal of personas is to group similar customer characteristics together, until you're left with a manageable number of personas, representing about 80% of your audience (3-5, depending on your organization's size. If you have too many, the exercise only adds to your audience complexity).

When developing user personas, you must collect actionable data that tells you something about the audience segment, so you can respond to their behavior with persuasive, impactful marketing.

Pro tip - save yourself the sanity and feed all of your data sources into a customer data platform (CDP). A CDP helps you collect, normalize, manage, transform, and act on your data - helping you see themes, reveal opportunities, and personalize marketing (among so many other things).

Remember, you're trying to understand intangibles like motivations, concerns, turn-offs, and position in the buyer lifecycle, as well as tangibles like location, age, and education level, to paint a clear and divisive picture of the different types of people making up your core audience.

You must also plan how you'll identify these personas in your various channels (website, email, mobile push, etc.) to deliver the right content.

For example, if someone visits a product category page on your website, will you be able to assume their persona? Most likely, no - but it becomes one more data point in your CDP painting a picture.

To walk you through the steps, we'll use a previous client success story.

Building a Persona Step 1 - Qualitative data

What do you think you know?

Get started by affinity mapping (a fancy way of saying an organized brainstorming session).

Give everyone in the brainstorming session some good ole fashion sticky notes to write out the different needs, problems, and goals of your customer base.

When the session is over, collect all the ideas and assumptions and post them up on a board to discuss, edit, and form groups.

You're done when you have "buckets" or categories that the majority of your customer base fit into and can be divided between. Next, take each "bucket" and brainstorm the attributes of individuals making up that group.

After everyone brainstorms, again, group the attributes beneath each user group to form the basis of your personas.

Step 2 - Mixing in quantitative data

Okay, but what do you really know?

You're developing a clear idea of your personas, but let's be real, you're making quite a few assumptions.

Next, we review all of our customer data to get to the bottom of what's really driving (and holding back) our customers.

This is a crucial step to move away from our assumptions and truly learn about our audience, but it's not always easy. In fact - 50% of companies feel like getting accurate data for personalization is a challenge.

Survey:

Go ahead and survey customers by email, phone, or on your website to collect demographic info, pain points, preferences, and what makes them tick. AI survey tools expedite this task.

Internal data and Analytics:

Back to the CDP! Curate data from sales, returns, reviews, call centers, whatever you can get your hands on in your CDP. Layer in analytics information from Google Analytics 4 for engagement data, like frequency of visits, pages visited, bounce rates, popular product categories, etc.

The CDP makes it easier to see patterns, identify activated audience segments, make recommendations based on customer actions, and unify personalization across channels.

External data:

Industry data and published research can provide a baseline for building personas. Whether it's a Forrester report or free Census data, you can gain insight into your industry demographics and spending habits.

Your goal is to overlay concrete data with your qualitative brainstorming session.  

For example, layering demographics and psychology of audience segments help to understand different customers' priorities, primary interests, and lifestyle aspirations.

Step 3 - Building out the persona

Mapping out user personas can be overwhelming - we've been there. You can lay multiple versions side by side to understand your key audience segments.

In our example, we build detailed caricatures of each persona covering budget, lifestyle goals, prized features, key needs, and values and then develops unique storylines for a hyper-personalized customer journey.

Next, you need to make sure your personas are actionable. Meaning, what actions will they take that will help you recognize and categorize them?

PSST- this is another area where an integrated CDP makes actioning on persona activity a breeze.

Step 4 - Identifying your personas

This exercise focuses on identifying actionable personas - looking into what actions each persona might take, so you can recognize an anonymous visitor on the site and categorize them.

In our example, our sample client combines website actions and email behavior, such as page visits, clicks, browser behavior, email signup, purchase history, and survey data, to deliver the right message, at the right time. These insights inform what personalized content and imagery is most relevant to each persona.

Examples of Actionable Behaviors:

We've listed some of our favorite actionable behaviors below:

Website Behavior:

• Website pages viewed
• Mobile/desktop device
• Product/product categories viewed
• Content downloads
• Submitted Preferences
• Search activity
• Cart activity

Email Behavior:

• Opens (email themes, frequency of opens
• Clicks, conversion rates
• Device (mobile vs. desktop)
• Email sign up
• Time spent with email (skim/read)

Offline Behavior:

• Phone calls
• Meetings
• Surveys, interviews
• Mail
• In-store activity/purchases
• Events

Miscellaneous:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital Status
• Location
• Career category
• Industry
• Family status

Keep in mind, the data points you capture are highly dependent on your business. For example, your customers' marital status may not be a necessary attribute for your business, but if you sold engagement rings, it would be very important for targeting your products.

Marketing Persona Challenges

Marketing personas are fluid. One customer can transition between user personas.

For example, if you have one user persona representing new customers and one for experienced customers, the new customer will eventually transition into an experienced customer, once they've made a few purchases. Months later, they might begin browsing a completely opposite product category, and require the same nurturing that a new customer requires.

It's a moving target. Make sure your personas are flexible enough to encompass the natural flow of your buyer cycle and associated behavior triggers.

Need help? Our digital strategists love helping businesses gain a better picture of their audience and can help you explore CDP options. Let's talk.