How To Create An Audience Persona?

Everybody wants their business or startup to succeed. The tricky part is that no matter how much work you put into it, there is always something left to do. There are steps in your general marketing strategy that you must prioritize. One of them is the overall attention to your market and audience. And if we look into a more focused area, your target audience must be thoroughly examined. Your audience is the same group of individuals to whom your specific campaigns aim. So how do you ensure the success of your audience? One of the crucial steps is to create an Audience Persona. 

What is an Audience Persona?

Personas generally refer to fictional representations of specific groups of people. In this case, an Audience Persona fits the characteristics of your different target audiences. Personas assist you in attempting to understand the methods of getting to your audiences on a more individualized scale. That, in turn, will only be possible with the accurate depiction of the right offers, messages, and products correspondingly. 

How many Audience Personas do you need?

Your team will need thorough research to gather a specific number for creating your personas. The latter should be general market research which will include market segmentation. The latter will help pinpoint your primary target consumer groups. And, of course, you will then divide those individuals into their subgroups.

For instance, if you own a coffee house, the chances are that your target audiences are quite different from each other. A group may be coffee fanatic who pays attention to every ingredient that goes into their cup of coffee and the way you create it. 

Another group of your coffee shop target audience may be the individuals who attend for the great aura, the fresh bean smell, and the presence of their loved ones.

Another target audience group for your coffee shop may be the busy people running late for work who want nothing but a quick shot of espresso. 

Your main priority here is to ensure that the descriptions of the mentioned subgroups are exact. However, it is optional to spend all of your time defining details. But still take advantage of important information. Everything should be in an outstanding balance. 

The moral of the story is that there is no concrete number for deciding how many Audience Personas you need to come up with. It all is directly intertwined with the number of your target audiences. Your Audience Personas will act as a tool to deepen your relationship with your target audiences further. 

The initial step of creating your Audience Persona is determining your target audience. 

To avoid any confusion, let us briefly define what the target audience stands for. 

A target audience is a group of individuals that a given company aims to reach with its marketing strategies. The main goal of defining your target audience is to find people with their interests, education, dreams, and problems in mind. These are supposed to match those of your ideal customers. 

There are solely a few simple questions that you must answer to uncover your target audience. 

Firstly, who are they? For instance, you can come to conclusions by checking your followers’ engagements in your social media networks. You can also include the people who have already purchased from your business once. Chances are, they might come back.

You ought to understand the most prominent issues and difficulties of your target audience and their desires. When answering these questions, you must thoroughly remove yourself from the picture and search for the answers from your consumers’ perspectives. 

What online tools do these people use for consuming information? Once you know what communication channels your target audience prefers, you can utilize them for sending your messages. 

Determining the natural advantages that your company offers is another must. It has to be a solution to some sort of issue that your potential clients are seeking. That is where your competitive advantages come into the picture. 

You also need to consider the negative thoughts of your potential consumers. In understanding that, you will know what are the things that you will need to avoid. 

Secondly, you have to look at your target audience’s Psychographics. 

Psychographics already hints at what it stands for. It is the psychological examination of customers, including their values, attitudes, lifestyle, interests, opinions, etc. 

This is much more in-depth and personal research to better understand your audiences. 

When you know what behaviors encourage your consumers to make purchases, you also know what advertising tools to use to stay relevant. 

It is human nature to compare things, in this case, the products and services of different companies. So, if you know what feelings your consumers evoke when buying from you, you prioritize the most suitable advertising techniques. 

For example, if you are familiar with your audience’s beliefs, your messaging can be more individual.

If you have gotten to know the aspects of life that your consumers do not overlook, you can skip those in your messaging. 

If you have learned what type of content your audience reads, you will know where to target them. 

The whole point of Psychographics is to be less subjective. They are necessary for formulating the relevant messages and sending them in the right direction. 

Psychographics are mainly divided into three types which are interests, activities, and opinions. 

Interests are the preferences and attraction to various things.

Activities involve everything people do.

Opinions are people’s judgments. 

Next up, you must explore your audience demographics.

Gathering demographic information about your consumers is vital. This can be a critical point that will help develop your business further. Understandably, demographic data is also significant while creating your Audience persona.

You will need to answer many questions to find perfect and content demographic information. 

Different customers are fond of different kinds of products. Many factors hold the power to address their preferences. Those include income, ethnicity, age, and household type. 

The mentioned are pretty much the most relevant data that one must find for complete demographics. 

The first point that helps with demographics is population and household. Population refers to the customers that live in the exact geographic location. Household, on the other hand, speaks more about the people that reside in the same house. That has nothing to do with their connections with one another. It can be a married couple with children or a group of college kids living in the same apartment. 

The household income covers the overall net salary that the people living together bring to the table. Understandably, there can be high-income, middle-income, and low-income households. 

The next specifier of demographics is age. It is so important to note this when targeting consumers. You will get specific age groups for your customers according to what kind of product you sell. For instance, if you sell entertainment games, the likelihood of earning loyal consumers aged 18-30 is the highest. 

The following step you must consider for creating your Audience persona is pinpointing the behavioral trends of your audiences. 

Consumer behavior keeps rapidly changing over time. To understand that better, you must remember everything your customers might want, where they want to access it, and when they aim to do it.

A few notable consumer trends will help you understand your consumer behavior and detect your upcoming marketing techniques. And, of course, as this is a behavioral description, it will hold a role in helping you characterize your audience personas.

First of all, consumers may prefer a few payment options. For instance, they want online payment options that allow debit and credit cards and PayPal payments.

Having delivery is a significant advantage when it comes to having a business. That is because consumers would like their items to go to their door rather than pick them up themselves.

Consumers now go for more sustainable and ethical products. That is due to the overall mindset shift of the world. This behavior has peaked in the last 3-4 years. 

Undoubtedly, social media personas now have a considerable influence on customers. Whenever they recommend a product, they invite a lot of traffic to the website of a given business. Thus, you can only benefit from sponsoring an Instagram blogger with a decent following. 

Customers tend to buy from businesses that allow monthly subscriptions. These businesses experience the most eye-catching growth and have more consumers stick with them.

Consumers spend a lot of money on their pets and always succeed in spending as much money as needed for the proper care of their furry friends. 

Defining the roles of your audience is what comes next.

You have to specify the most familiar roles regarding your target audience. A crucial aspect of marketing and sales is uncovering your target audience’s belonging on a broader scale. 

To make your Audience Persona more productive, you must give it a job title and decision-making tendencies. 

To understand this better, let’s see an example. Let’s imagine that you are in a startup software business. The Operations VP is your primary target audience. These people are typically the decision-makers who ultimately sign the contracts. 

So to remember that you are marketing software, the utilization of technical wording is the best way to reach that audience. 

However, that is far from accurate when it comes to this case. That is because the VP makes decisions regardless of what your company undergoes internally. The VP might instead hold interest in the cost ranges of your product and the consequences of their company’s conditions after your product’s usage. 

Thus, if you use a lot of technical wording in your advertising, you might miss the significant points that would sell your product. 

However, let us say that your buyer is an engineer, not the VP. In this case scenario, technical jargon would be the strong point in advertising your product because that is what the engineer is seeking while purchasing software.

See, in instances like this, the VP and the engineer are employed in the same environment. However, their needs vary. And this is the thin line you can see between different audience subgroups. 

Getting familiar with the subtle aspects of their roles is something you must do to ensure successful audience subgroups. And, as we already know, the latter is significant for creating your Audience persona. 

And there you have your Audience Personas ready.

It is crucial to make sure that your Audience Personas have human characteristics, ones that others would be able to relate to. Do not focus on blind assumptions and stereotypes. Your Audience Personas speak for real individuals. 

When you have all the necessary traits, think of names and design looks for your Audience persona. And that is how all the data you gather helps you create the final product. 

This is where we conclude the “How to Create an Audience Persona” blog. We began the blog by defining what Audience Persona stands for. Then we went into detail on the various steps to create your Audience Persona. Be sure to check out our main website for more fun content.