Creating personas allows you to construct what your ideal customer looks like. This can optimise your business strategy, as marketing can be directed at current and potential customers who match your chosen persona. If your company has more than one target audience, multiple personas can be created. However three or four is the recommended amount. When constructing persona’s, demographic and psychographic information needs to be considered.
Demographics
Customer demographic includes elements such as age, gender, socio-economic group, and geographic location. You may be thinking, how do you gain this information? This information can be accessed from social media insights and google analytics. Due to the vast amount of information shared online by the population many assumptions can be made about a certain demographics.
Psychographics
Psychographic information comprises of customer motivations, desires, goals, and interests. This helps to identify reasons behind why customers choose to engage with your brand. A driver of a customer could be that they are motivated to shop ethically. Another defining psychographic element could be that the audience is interested in a niche sport such as stand up paddle boarding. Additionally, how the target audience interacts with digital technology can also be identified. Elements such as the social media channels that the customers is active on, and the device and the browser used to access the website can be collected. This information can also be gathered by website analytics. However, surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews can be used to provide richer data.
Benefits
Generating profiles for your consumer will benefit your business as a whole. This is as marketing budgets can be spent wisely, as knowledge can be obtained about how the customers like to be targeted. To further this point the marketing message can also be optimised as the tone can be tailored to the audience preferences. If social media advertising is chosen as a marketing channel the audience in which it is shown to can be refined to maximise results. Additionally, by investigating psychographics customer pain points can be identified and targeted, which will enhance customer satisfaction. Stakeholders will also be reassured due to there being physical evidence to back up how budgets are being spent.
