Many companies understand the importance of developing buyer personas, which are notional representations of their ideal customers based on market research. However, they might not realize the value in also developing marketing personas, which are not exactly the same as buyer personas. Creating marketing personas can contribute to understanding your target audience and the success of marketing your business.
Let’s dive into how to create marketing personas for your business.
Quick takeaways:
A marketing persona is a character with distinct demographic and psychographic attributes who has a problem your product or service can solve. Each persona can be combined with market segmentation to represent specific customers.
You can use marketing personas to consider your ideal customers’ goals, desires, and limitations. You can also apply marketing personas to your marketing goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Personas can be used to guide decisions about products, services, interactions, features, website design, and other marketing strategies.
Creating marketing personas for your business will provide a number of key benefits:
The purpose of qualitative market research is to understand different buyer attitudes and beliefs. It is not intended to measure data or forecast results. Qualitative market research methods are exploratory, as they do not typically provide measurable data or support data-based forecasting. To conduct qualitative market research, you must talk to a group of people within your target audience.
Use the following methods to perform qualitative market research:
Once you have gathered this information, you can generate hypotheses about your marketing personas.
When conducting focus groups or interviews, consider asking the following questions as part of collecting qualitative information about your target audience:
The purpose of quantitative market research is to test the findings from exploratory qualitative research. Quantitative market research methods are validating, as you can organize, tabulate, and analyze the data with statistical models. To conduct quantitative research, you must collect data from a variety of sources.
Use the following quantitative market research methods to gather and analyze data:
You can then use this information to test the hypotheses you created with your qualitative marketing research.
Use the following types of statistical analyses to evaluate your marketing data:
Creating marketing personas will help you to understand your ideal customers’ wants and needs. This strategy will guide your decision-making when creating and marketing your products and services, ensuring that you target your approaches to the right audience. It will also help you to improve lead generation and lead scoring, and create consistency in your marketing across the organization.
Need help creating a marketing persona for your business? Sellerant can guide the way.