Audience personas are an effective tool to help businesses understand the profile, motivations, and needs of their customers and ideal prospects. Learn how to easily create them using our free template below (and why we love them so much).
What are audience personas?
Audience personas are semi-fictional, generalised representations of a company’s ideal customers. Why semi-fictional? Simply because they are based on scrutinising and gaining insights from your current customer base, through surveys and interviews. However, personas should also be aspirational, focusing on your most desirable customers – who you’d like to connect with.
By personifying your ideal customers, you give structure and context to your company, which has endless benefits, ultimately leading to more successful and profitable business.
Why are audience personas so useful to marketers?
Developing concise audience personas helps to shape marketing, content, messaging, product development, services, and many other critical business functions. One example of this is adapting marketing materials for a certain segment of your target audience. Imagine you are selling carpets to homeowners. Sending out the same brochure to all homeowners will be much less effective than sending out three different brochures – one for young professionals, one for families with kids and pets, and one for an elderly couple. Adapting to three different personas will bring back a higher return on investment.
Another aspect of audience personas is that it helps your employees connect with customers on a much better level. They should automatically go to a certain mindset, depending on what persona they are dealing with. By defining personas and providing training on them, your team will become increasingly adept at this.
In short, audience personas:
Segment contacts for sales and marketing
Help ensure everybody is on the same page
Help focus your efforts on the best customers
Develop desirable products and services
Run more successful promotions
Deliver more targeted messages
Here it is! Download your free simple Audience Persona template.
How to build an audience persona
Not all customers are the same and often have different motivations. Each wants (and expects) different things from your company. To understand them, you need to empathise, put yourself in their position, and walk in their shoes. This involves various forms of research:
Website analytics
Customer surveys and interviews
Social media
Market research
Forums
Talking to customer services and sales staff, as they are the ones who interact with your present customers most
Liaising with your leadership team for a more in-depth understanding of the business
As a minimum, an audience persona should include geographic (local, national, global), demographic (age, gender, family status, etc.), psychographic (personality, values, lifestyle), and behavioural (brand loyalty, price sensitivity, presence online) aspects.
All of this information is collated in an easy-to-navigate document for each persona. Each one will give an overview, and detail the typical frustrations and essential needs of the specific Marketing type.
No need to create your own, we've done it for you: download your free Audience Persona template here.
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