No matter what marketing strategy you are using, a core component to it is the establishment of a clear audience. Your audience may be very diverse, and you’ll have to use different techniques to attract them to visit your website or buy your product.
That’s when creating user personas comes in handy.
User personas are fictional characters who are your ideal target audience. By understanding and defining who they are, you’ll be able to plan and execute more effective marketing campaigns.
Understand Who Your Visitors Are
For starters, your audience may consist of people who are very different from each other. Even if you’re offering niche products, the personas may be very different. For example, let’s run a fictional e-commerce store for moms: Best Mom.
Best Mom gives advice through blog posts on many motherhood-related topics. It also sells baby-related items, such as clothes, pacifiers, formula, parenting books, early education books for children, etc.
The audience for Best Mom can be very diverse — single moms, moms who have sons, moms who have daughters, middle-class suburban moms, new moms, modern moms, traditional moms, etc.
Our efforts to attract them to the store may differ based on who they are. Whatever you do, it’s crucial to understand who the users of the product are going to be.
To solve a problem that potential customers have, you’ll first need to understand what needs different audiences have. By having these answers, you’ll be able to make your advertising efforts better suited to respective crowds.
To create a user persona, try answering the following questions:
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Who is my ideal customer?
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What are the current pain points they may be facing?
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What are the products that could reduce the pain points that they’re facing?
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How do these personas normally behave?
Wrap your answers with some context and give specific names to them. Make them more personal to you.
An example of a user persona for our fictional e-commerce shop, Best Mom, could be:
Jannet the-new-mom — She has just given birth and is very new and unexperienced in motherhood. Her major problem now is to learn as much as possible about being a mom and find products that will ease her daily work with the baby. She has a lot of questions and little time to research. She wants opinions and advice and won’t hesitate to buy a product if she sees good value for her baby. She’s also interested in reading tips on the main newborn-related challenges shared by other, more experienced moms.
The definition of our user persona is very clear: new mom, a lot of questions about motherhood, not sure how to behave in certain situations, needs advice.
Drive User Personas to Your Website
A more targeted marketing strategy can be used to attract Jannet to visit Best Mom.
Provide personalised content on your webpage
We know that Jannet is a new mom, and we know what pain points she’s facing. The first place she’ll look for the answers is Google. That’s why we can come up with relevant content that will answer the main questions that Jannet has on a daily basis. We have to research the main topics that new moms are interested in and share lots of content in our blog. We must ensure that our blog is well-optimised for SEO . We should also consider paid advertising, to rank higher, because Jannet is a busy mom and may not have time to scroll the search page to find the answers.
Be where your audience is
After Google, Jannet will definitely look for advice in various motherhood-related Facebook groups. We want to be there. We want to share our blog posts and solutions there. In the end, these groups are an easy catch of visitors and potential customers for us because they contain hundreds or even thousands of similar user personas.
Use relevant artwork
Jannet has a newborn baby. She won’t be interested in older kids. Well, at least for now. The first thing that she’ll notice in our ads and artwork in our posts will be visuals — we have to use newborn babies in them to catch her attention. This will ensure that Jannet will be more inclined to click through to our website.
Additional tips
Your business may have many potential clients who are all different. That’s why once you’re done with one user persona, repeat the whole process again, and work on creating as many of them as possible. Remember to stay relevant and emphasise quality over quantity. You may only have a couple of well-defined and targeted audiences that work for you. Or you may have tens of user personas. There is no right or wrong here. Relevance is key.
Apply the same user persona profiles in creating your social media advertising. Use the information you have to target better and more-defined audiences that are more likely to engage with your product.
Don’t forget to revisit the persona profiles from time to time as they may change. Don’t be afraid to minimise the attention you spend on some of the personas. They will not be delivering at the same pace. If you’re spending too much time on the ones that deliver poorer results, maybe it’s better to reconcentrate and spend more time and efforts on better-delivering ones.
Conclusion
When defining your marketing strategy, remember to keep in mind who your user personas will be. Establish clear profiles with extra details that will help you better target these audiences. User relevant information in your descriptions and be as realistic as possible. Don’t be afraid of stereotypes, because frequently they are very real descriptions of us.
Generally, having user personas is very helpful in all stages of the product lifecycle. If you’re planning a new product, you want to know who you’re developing it for. If you already have a product, you want to advertise it to the right crowd.
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