Marketing success requires you to understand your target market. Personas are a great way to do this. This is a way to take raw data and understand a group of people into one fictional person.
You then use this persona to guide and support marketing decisions. Good personas lead to the right choices. However, a poorly written can prevent a campaign from failing.
To better reflect your target market, personas can be updated. It would be best if you also remembered that people change over time. Therefore, it is essential to update your personas frequently. These are helpful ways to learn more about your target audience and improve your personas.
Get Undercover with Your Market
Spending time with your target market is one of the best ways to learn about them. Spend time with your target market, go where they are, and do what they do. Then pretend that you live their life.
Undercover can provide valuable insight into a person’s thinking and buying habits.
Although creating a persona using data and filling in the gaps by making assumptions is easy, there may be better approaches. Spending time with your target customers will help you create a more human persona. It will feel more like someone with a life, habits, and lives.
It would help if you also tried to be present online with them. What are they posting on social networks, and what will they email a friend? Which sources of information are they most confident in? Find out what sites they visit and follow them on social media.
Even if you only have brief contact with your target market, it can improve your personas and help marketers develop more creative and efficient ideas.
Interviewing Customers
Get information straight from the source to help you build your personas. Personas should represent the market. Talking to current customers is an excellent way to get information, as they can directly represent that market.
Interviewing customers is a great way to build a persona or improve it. Interviews should be focused on the customer’s background and how it influenced their decision to buy your product.
These could include their typical demographics, their job title, and how much they earn. It also helps to know if any other people influence their buying decisions. You can discover the critical moments of the buyer’s journey, such as how they came across your business and their feelings about it.
Next, interview more customers. As many customers as possible should be questioned. You can build a more accurate persona by gathering as much complex data as possible. Begin by conducting interviews over the phone or via Skype.
You can meet with many customers, from long-term fans to people who are just starting. After you have identified trends, start sending surveys to collect data.
Use that data to identify trends. Your ideal customers and your perfect market share the same job, education, or hobbies. You can then use this data to inform your marketing decisions.
One caution: Just because you like a trend doesn’t necessarily mean that you should include it in your marketing. You should take your data with a grain. Consider how it might fit into your marketing and branding.
Your target market may be interested in a particular trend, such as many people who enjoy football. You don’t have to rebrand your entire company to be sports-themed. However, it is safe to include some sports analogies within your content.