Persona's - What are they and why you should use them!

Persona’s
The Ultimate Guide To

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Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................................... 3
What are Personas?.................................................................................................................................... 4
Types of Personas....................................................................................................................................... 5
What information do they contain?......................................................................................................... 6
Are personas useful?..................................................................................................................................7
Benefits of using personas....................................................................................................................... 8
How to create your own persona..........................................................................................................10
Examples of Personas...............................................................................................................................15
How to use your new persona(s)...........................................................................................................16
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................17

Introduction.
How well do you know your customers, I mean really know your customers?
If you’re anything like the majority of businesses out there, you have a vague idea who your target market is. You might have even
written it down once or twice, filed it away and forgotten about it.
A good business owner or marketing manager will have identified their target audience so they have a reasonable idea who they
want to attract and target their online marketing towards.
A better business owner or marketing manager will have segmented their target audience into smaller categories. Which helps them
to further improve the quality of their marketing decisions.
However, the business owner or marketing manager who wants to take their marketing communications to the next level will go the
extra distance and create personas.
As business owners, marketers and advertisers, we must take the time to understand what our audience wants to hear, not what we
want to say. An important first step to this is creating ‘personas’ of our prospects and customers.
You can’t do effective marketing without truly knowing who it is you are marketing too. Personas go a long way to help alleviate this.
Read on to find out exactly what personas are and how to create your own and how to put them to work.

What are Personas?
Personas are an incredible tool that makes it easier for you to visualise your audience in detail. They help
you understand your customers better.
Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different needs, goals, motivations, and
behaviours of your prospects or customers, that might use your site, brand,
product or service.
Personas are names, faces, personalities, families, traits and more which helps you to conceptualise what
that person would need or want in real life. They are depicted as a person but they are not a real person.
One of our first tasks when working with a new client is fleshing out the different personas. This allows us
to produce highly relevant content that’s used to create our SEO strategies; or write highly targeted copy
for PPC advertising campaigns. Just think how powerful it is to be able to write ad copy with a distinct
person in mind.
Personas help us to understand the emotional and behavioural triggers behind individual customers
within that market. If we can personalise our messaging and user experiences we can improve our rate of
persuasion and ultimately conversion.
It is important to note that personas are not a single user. They are a representation of the different
segments of your target audience.

Types of personas.
As you’ll read below, there are a couple of different types of personas.
The persona that you use will depend on your position. For example, a UX or web designer would use a UX/Web Persona. A UX/
Web Persona helps designers understand what different users of a website are going to be doing at various stages. Helping them
design a website that is user-friendly, intuitive and that will convert more visitors to customers (or whatever the ultimate goal of the
site/application is).
Marketers use Marketing Personas so that they can better communicate and nurture their prospects and customers through their
sales funnels more efficiently.
Type Purpose
Marketing Personas Helps with developing Marketing Strategies and messaging
Web/UX Personas Web designers use personas to get a better understanding of who they are designing for.
Including the wants, needs, and motivations of various types of site visitors. The creation of
personas is necessary in order to build user flows that improves the user experience and
website results.

What info do personas contain?
Personas generally include the following information:
Personas
• A fictional name.
• Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity,
occupation, income, location and family status.
• Psychographics such as goals, motivation, frustrations.
• Values & fears.
• Brands that they use.
• A short bio.
• Marketing message.
In many cases a persona will be a 1 - 2 page document including a photo that includes the above and a few fictional details to make the persona
a realistic character (not to much fiction though, you want to use as much real data as possible when creating your personas)
For UX/Web Persona, you would also include
• Persona group.
• Webographics - Web experience, usage location, device
(desktop, tablet, mobile), usage frequency, social media sites,
favourite sites in and out of category.
• The goals and tasks they are attempting to complete using the
site.
• A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona as it
relates to your site.

Multiple Personas
It is likely that you will develop multiple personas for your business. 3 - 5 personas are usually enough to represent your audience. These will
reflect either the different stages of product, application or web development or the various stages of your sales funnel. For example, a prospect
that is in the ‘research’ phase is going to have different goals and seek different information to a prospect that is further down the funnel and in
the ‘buying’ phase.
Are personas useful?
I hope you’re starting to see the power that personas can provide a business owner or marketer. By being able to communicate effectively
to your prospects or customers and deliver relevant information at the most opportune time is going to have a significant impact on your
conversions and bottom line.
Personas were once the secret of large organisations, but as the online marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, savvy business owners
and marketers are starting to adopt them. Largely because when done right, they work.
For anyone who is doing or has done Facebook advertising you will be familiar with the level of targeting that is now available to all business
owners. Even on a small budget, you can target your customers down to location, age, gender, language, relationship, language, education and
much more. You can see how useful personas are going to be for your here. No more guessing. You can create highly targeted campaigns to

different personas with different messages, relevant to that persona.
Benefits of using personas
Personas enable designers, marketers and business owners to consider the goals, motivations and limitations of your prospects
and customers. They help guide decisions about your products/services, marketing communications all the way through to the user
journeys on your website. They help make your decisions objective instead of subjective by being able to make decisions on data
instead of assumptions.
For Designers
As I’ve already said, personas enable us to visualise our target audience better, which helps us design and create better user
experiences for them. They can assist in determining a need or goal for a particular persona, so that you know precisely how to
design for them, and what will resonate.
• They will represent a major user group on your website
• You can then focus on the primary needs and expectations of the most important personas.
• They help to provide a clear picture of the user’s expectations and how they’re likely to use the site

• Help with uncovering universal features and functionality
For Marketers
For SEO and Content Marketing they help us understand the person behind the search, this helps us to create content for marketing
to our customers, prospects, peers and influencers which are relevant and valuable.
• For Online Advertising they help us to write adverts that speak directly to our audience.
• They provide further insight into your various market segments.
• They help when developing marketing strategies
• They will help you achieve consistency with your marketing communications
• They will give everyone in your business a better understanding of your customer’s needs, wants and desires
• They help to craft Content Marketing strategies from having a clearer understanding of where your customers are spending their
time
• You can create improved lead nurturing programs for the different personas
Personas will help retain visitors longer once they are interested, and ultimately encourage them to convert into customers

How to create
your own personas
If you’re still here, that’s great! You obviously can see how useful personas are going to be to your business.
So let’s get stuck into creating your personas.
I have created a Persona Template for you that you can download here.
Even though there are different types of personas, I’m going to focus on the Marketing Personas. These are the ones that we
personally use when developing Content Marketing Strategies, SEO Strategies or PPC Advertising campaigns.
If this is the first time you will be creating a persona, and you’re a relatively new business, you might not have all the data that you
would like available to you. If that’s the case, don’t worry too much your personas will evolve with time. So while you will have to be
more fictional than is ideal, you will be able to update them as you collect more data. For personas to be truly effective there needs
to be some relevant and real data used. The main thing is they can be as basic or complicated as you like but at the end of the day
they need to be effective at illustrating what drives the different types of buyers of your products or services.

Questions to ask yourself
when creating your Marketing Persona’s
1. Location - Where do people from this persona live?
2. Age - What is the age range of this persona?
3. Gender - What is the gender of people in this persona?
4. Interests - What are the interests of people in this persona?
5. Education - What is the education level of this persona?
6. Job Title - What industry does your customers work in and what types of job titles
do they have?
7. Income Level - What is the income range of this persona?
8. Relationship Status - What is the relationship status of this persona?
9. Brands - What brands does this persona use, wear, relate to?
10. Goals - What are their primary and secondary goals?
11. Frustrations & Challenges - What challenges do they face and how do you solve
them?
12. Motivation - What are this personas reasons for buying your product or service?
13. What websites/Blogs do they read?
14. Short Bio - A short paragraph that provides a quick overview of the persona.
If you’re building UX/Web Personas you would also include the following -
1. What is the purpose of this site?
2. What are the goals for this site?
3. What devices does your persona use to access the internet?
4. What other software is your persona regularly using?
5. How much time do they spend online?
You can include any questions that are going to help provide you with clarity and
understanding around your audience and serve them better.

Where can you find information to help to build your Personas -
CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
If you are already using a CRM, there is a good chance that it has some segmentation built in that will
enable you to break your contacts down into different categories.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great information resource for learning about people who frequent your website.
Within your Google Analytics console, you will find information on demographics, interests, language
and locations. Just login to your Google Analytics account and select Audience on the left-hand side,
in the dropdown you will see options for Demographics, Interest, Behaviour, Technology and more.
Google Analytics will also inform you of what keywords are used to find you, time spent on the site
and what devices they used. This information can reveal the motivation behind what led them there.

Social Media (Facebook/Twitter etc.)
If you have a Facebook page, you can select ‘Insights’ located at the top of the page. The first tab
will display a summary of activity on your page. Down the left-hand side you will see a menu with
options that provide more information. Such as the People tab which will give you an overview of
age, gender and location of your page fans.
You can also utilise your social media accounts to listen to what your customers are saying. It is also
the perfect platform to ask your fans/followers some questions.
If you want to take Facebook a little further, you can use Facebook Search to delve further into your
fans interests. Try the following 6 Facebook search queries (just swap out the words in capitals) -
• Favourite interests of people who like PAGE NAME
• Pages liked by people who like PAGE NAME and PAGE NAME
• People who work at PLACE and like SOMETHING
• TYPE OF BUSINESS in LOCATION visited by people who like PAGE NAME
• Brand pages liked by people who like PAGE NAME
• Pages liked by GENDER who like PAGE NAME

Surveys
Services like SurveyMonkey or Google Surveys allow you to create surveys which can be readily sent
out to your mailing list. When creating your survey be sure to use open-ended questions. The goal is to
understand what your customers are thinking. Giving them yes/no questions limits the feedback you’ll
receive. I would recommend asking 5-10 questions, too little and you won’t have enough feedback, too
many and you might not get any feedback. Such as -
• When did you realise you needed a product/service like ours?
• What challenge does our product/service solve in your life?
• What concerns did you have before buying our product/service?
And of course, ask your customers, pick up the phone and have some conversations. Again use open
question and let your customers speak.
Image Source – Survey Monkey

Examples of Personas
Image Source – MailChimp Image Source – Smart Insights

How to use your
new persona into action
So now that you have your new marketing personas, here are five ways you can put them into action -
1. Check your marketing communications and ensure you are using the same language that your personas use.
2. Segment your contact list into personas so you can send out more targeted messages.
3. Review your online advertising and ensure they are targeting your personas most effectively.
4. Optimise your landing pages to suit your personas, again look at language and imagery.
5. Develop your Content Marketing Strategy around your personas so you are deliver relevant and timely information to them.

Conclusion
Hopefully, I have been able to illustrate the power of using personas and how they can help improve your marketing efforts. They
can provide insights into how to create better user experiences, persuasive copy, or pricing models.
By improving the way in which you understand and communicate with your customers you will improve your conversion rates.
The key is to create them out of actual, relevant data as soon as you can.
What is most important, is to remember your personas should reflect real people with real motivations, desires, and concerns.
Now it’s over to you, download the below Persona Template and have a shot at creating some personas for your business. I am
positive that they are going to change the way you communicate with your audience.

Effective marketing creates a powerful bond between your brand and your customers.
It’s crucial to be visible online, but with every other business competing for attention, it
can be difficult to stand out. If your potential customers are unable to find you online,
you’re going to miss out on a lot of business.
You need to engage with your prospects and customers like never before. Today’s
digital world is a complex place and the landscape changes almost daily. Not only do
you need to be at the cutting edge of advanced techniques, you need to constantly
evolve your digital strategy to ensure your success. It’s not easy, especially when you
have a business to run.
Media Evolution is a Gold Coast-based digital marketing company that uses digital
strategies, online marketing (SEO, PPC and Content Marketing) and web design
services to help businesses like yours achieve outstanding results. With us, you’re
free to focus on running your business, safe in the knowledge that your marketing is in
expert hands.
At Media Evolution, we believe in building strong, long-term relationships with our
clients. After all, your success is our success. We don’t believe in simply designing
your website or handing you a digital strategy and sending you on your way; we work
alongside you as your strategic partner, ensuring that you continue to exceed your
objectives month after month.
Our clients come from a diverse range of industries, including legal, education, property,
health and fitness retail and professional services. You can find out more about our
clients in our folio, or you can contact us to find out how we can help your business
achieve great results.
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Persona's - What are they and why you should use them!

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