Correct Marketing: Building Personas from the Target Audience

It seems like everyone talks about building personas, but always asks us to “invent” or “imagine” them. I believe that building personas starts with our experience with customers, and in this article, I’ll share with you exactly how I characterize personas for my business, market my activity and enhance my brand’s reputation.

In the previous article, I detailed how one can characterize the target audience correctly for a business, and now I’m taking it a step further to talk about creating personas suitable for your business, from the target audience.

Indeed, it’s our ability to understand who we’re addressing. Who are we appealing to, and as a group, what interests them, what bothers them, and what are their needs?

When we talk about a persona, the goal is to create a sort of avatar that helps us personalize to the target audience. It essentially enables us to understand more deeply what someone’s individual experience is within our target audience and to make inferences. From specific to general.

Creating the Persona

Developing personas aids us in refining our content marketing, fostering a sense that we’ve tailored our messaging specifically for each individual. It’s as if we already possess an intimate understanding of their challenges and aspirations.

To illustrate this concept, let’s consider recruiting Manchester United as an example. As a football team, our group members share similar interests and are generally of the same age bracket. They maintain a certain level of fitness, have comparable family dynamics, and fall within a relatively uniform income bracket. In essence, there are overarching characteristics common to all team members, comprising our target audience – a collective sharing similar cultural, demographic, and experiential traits.

However, when we narrow our focus to an individual player within the team, such as Cristiano Ronaldo (acknowledging his departure from the team), we get insight into his unique background, objectives, and personality traits. These attributes are distinctively his and likely diverge from those of his teammates, not solely because of his Portuguese nationality as opposed to being British.

But if I look at Cristiano Ronaldo’s experience, other team members can still relate. The distance from home, being under the spotlight, the pressure on game results… and with that experience, you can do amazing marketing.

So, I’m going to share with you how I’ve defined the personas for my business.

Fasten your seat belts. Let’s begin.

Characterize at What Stage Your Business Is

You might be reading this and not fully grasping the connection between this discussion and personas. Well, in my view, they are closely intertwined.

If you’re just starting your business and haven’t yet engaged with significant customers, I strongly advise against crafting target audiences. It’s wise to wait until you’ve gained more experience with customers. The rationale is straightforward: anyone suggesting you create personas out of thin air is essentially urging you to conjure up a fictional character. You can only speculate and fabricate details without real-world insight.

It’s asking to being asked to envision life in a Tibetan monastery on top of a mountain in Zhangdu, China. Without firsthand experience, the gap between reality and imagination would be overwhelming..

However, if you’ve already gained experience and collaborated with numerous customers, your business may be ready to define personas that can elevate your marketing and branding efforts to the next level.

I wish I had more like this.

Your first persona should be the customer you most enjoyed working with, where you felt you had a lot of value to offer them, and the experience was excellent for both sides.

The reason is simple: you want to attract more people just like them.

A few months ago, an amazing investment fund came to me for the process of storytelling, website redesign, and content writing.

The CEO is a humble and polite person who asks questions and doesn’t dictate facts on the ground. From the very beginning, he and the team treated me as an essential part of the organization and made me a true partner in their marketing processes.

In practice, this means they involved me with department managers in the organization, consulted me on matters not directly related to the project, and gave me feedback that helped me deliver an amazing product in return.

If that’s not enough, the client paid only one day after I sent a payment request for 50% of the work, and the same happened at the end of the project. And he even gave me a bonus because our process was extended.

I couldn’t have imagined all this beforehand. If asked before who the customer I would most enjoy working with, I would probably have thought in a way that wouldn’t have allowed me to enter the experience of feeling significant and part of the team. Until that point, I didn’t even know that was something I was missing.

So if you have a customer you’re hoping to have more like them, delve into it. Why do you want more like them? Is it the price they paid, the way they partnered on the project, the impact you left… anything like that – write it down.

From here, we continue to create the persona.

Infrastructure for Writing a Persona

Like everything else in life, writing a persona has a template that can be used. I like to use templates because they give me a sense of order and consistency.

Although most people stop at writing dry data, please keep reading because in my opinion, creating personas doesn’t end here.

I like to use a persona template that includes a name and summary, pain points, goals, personality, motivations, and needs.

It looks like the image below, but of course, I’m attaching a written example:

(image: Building a Persona from the Target Audience)

Name + Bio

The full name with a few lines that tell me what that persona does, what role they’re in, and what’s important to them.

Example:

Mirit Delpi

31 years old, with a degree in graphic design

Works as a graphic designer half-time in a shared studio and half-time in her private studio.

Lives in Jaffa, in a rented apartment.

Pain Points

2-3 points summarizing the reasons why a particular client or customer contacted you. What pains them, and what solutions they needed.

Example:

She produces amazing graphic designs, but she’s not well-known, causing her to doubt herself.

She has tried coaching processes in the past but felt it was a waste of money. She feels lost.

It’s hard for her to find motivation to do “the stuff around” work.

Goals

Defining the goals set by the clients or our shared work that will lead them to achieve something we see as a top goal.

Example:

To establish authority in her field

A system that brings her clients effortlessly

To expand her business

To bring in new clients

Certainty – knowing where the business is progressing

Personality

Write a few words about the specific personality of that persona. Put down everything you learned from the client(s) and your analysis.

Example:

Energetic and happy with life alongside disappointment and doubts about the future. Seeks an easy solution, but when she has a clear path, she’s willing to work hard to see results.

She loves to read, to learn. Her curiosity makes her understand exactly how things work. She doesn’t tolerate mistakes, which means she’s tough on herself in times of failure.

Motivations

Write 4-5 motivations for the beginning of a shared work or the client’s choice of your service. I like to use a scale of 1-10 and place the client within that spectrum.

Example:

To build the business’s reputation 8/10

To achieve financial independence 9/10

To develop her business 9/10

To bring in new clients 10/10

Certainty – knowing where the business is progressing 6/10

Needs

Try to characterize the needs of your client, things they might not be sure about but you’ve identified there’s some pressing need here.

Example:

Knowing she’s on the right track and having confidence in her path.

Feeling like there’s someone who cares for her and won’t let her fall.

The Story

When talking about personas, there’s a structure that people like to use.

Names, ages, hobbies, pains… all sorts of things that to me are simply not enough.

Analyzing all these factors together is what will make your persona successful.

So, if the age of the persona you’re working on is 52, they love photography and riding motorcycles, and even though they’re CEOs, action is more important to them than money – I would try to find the values and the story behind this.

Values and the story are the foundation for a proper understanding of personas, and then precise writing to attract more clients like them.

So obviously, we’ll address age, gender, education, place of residence, income, etc… but we’ll do it as part of building our narrative.

For example: that 52-year-old CEO, he’s a father of three and married. He lives in a private house in a rural community in the center of the country, has a degree in design and visual perception but doesn’t work in design. In his spare time, he writes a blog about aesthetics, he’s an amateur photographer and enjoys off-road motorcycle riding.

From that I can see that he’s open-minded, adaptive, appreciates perseverance, and that things will be done well. I understand all this because he’s married with three children (and talks about them!), writes a blog that requires attention and perseverance over time, there’s a lot of aesthetics and design in his past and present, and he’s not afraid to take risks – motorcycles.

For a client like this, I’ll approach in a very different way than someone who is 43, and also a CEO of an organization. If a single parent to a 10-year-old daughter, she has lived in the old north of Tel Aviv for over a decade. She practices yoga four times a week, with a strict routine where she juggles between her career and work. She has a master’s degree in organizational psychology and links success to financial independence.

From her, I understand that she loves to be engaged, has good multitasking abilities, and also works well under pressure. She has a high level of self-awareness, like only graduates of psychology can be, and she’s a person of routine.

Am I 100% correct? – Definitely not.

But this analysis allows me a starting point and then to continue refining my persona. It’s not something linear, personas are a living thing that evolves and refines together with our analysis and understanding of them.

Content and Marketing

If you’ve followed the plan above and written down information about your persona at each stage, you should already have at least one persona you want to speak to.

I recommend building no more than 2-3 personas based on the customers you enjoyed working with the most. This is essentially the foundation of understanding who we’re addressing. But it’s not enough to know who we’re addressing; we need to know how to address them.

If you look above, you’ll see I recommended analyzing the demographic data and writing about their personality paragraph, along with their fears, motivations, and needs.

All of this needs to be in front of your eyes – all the time!

From analyzing all the data, you need to extract 2-3 key messages, and within our content marketing and offers to the audience, precisely address the components of fear. We need to show them that their reality will improve and that we will provide a real solution to their need.

Although this is the first step and it’s the basis for your writing, the best tip I can give you is to reach out to customers you’ve already helped and ask them how their experience working with you was, and what they would say to similar customers about the service you provided them.

Once your customers, on whom you built your persona, write to you, they’ll use terms and words you hadn’t thought of yourself. They will help you articulate the value they found in working with you. Suddenly, they will highlight aspects you didn’t even realize you were providing. Suddenly you’ll discover that your added value is actually in listening, or the feeling you give to the customer, and not the numerical result.

I did this with two clients for whom I built the content for my new website (I know I talk about it a lot, it’s just months of work…). I found out that both of them felt I was a core part of the team. And with this sentence, I’m going to market my content from now on.

So only after reaching out to your customers and receiving their feedback on their feelings about working with you, I invite you to ask yourself a few questions that will give you a good basis for marketing writing:

• How can you help your persona achieve their goals?
• How does the product or service solve a problem and provide an answer to the pains they are dealing with?
• What fears or doubts does the persona have, and how can trust be established with them?

The last question is not just about trust. Without this component, you won’t be able to sell anything. Building trust will contribute not only to purchases from your brand but will also increase your credibility.

To summarize

Building personas takes time.

I recommend building your personas solely based on past satisfied customers and who you think are ideal customers.

Building the right personas is a combination of demographic indicators, the analysis you do, and the words of the customer and the way they describe the work with you.