As marketers, are we putting too much energy and emphasis into personas? We might be.  While it’s true that personas are a helpful way to inform our segmentation strategies, they should not be the only consideration when it comes to effectively targeting customers and prospects. Evolving beyond static, simplified profiles to a more dynamic, data-driven, and holistic representation of your audience is the way forward.

What do we mean by personas, and what’s the problem?

 

In marketing, a buyer persona is a conceptual profile of a brand’s ideal customer. Brands use personas to develop a targeted marketing strategy based around a hypothetical customer’s demographics, income, interests, purchasing habits, and other attributes.

The limitation with personas is that they define who buyers are rather than explaining how or why they buy. Too often, marketers become more focused on these demographic differences rather than the fundamental pain points customers may be experiencing – and what could drive them to make a purchase.

People can be the same age, live in the same geographic location, earn the same amount of income, have some of the same hobbies and yet be completely different in what motivates them or affects their choices and behaviors.

What are some real-world examples of personas?

 

Imagine you are the owner of a personal fitness brand trying to attract more customers. Which of the following information about your audience do you think would be more useful, knowing the attributes about a customer listed in option A or B?

A. Customer is a 42-year-old dad of three, from New York, works in catering, and likes watching baseball.

B. Customer is a 42-year-old dad who feels exhausted after quitting sports years ago due to his increasingly busy life.

While most marketers are accustomed to focusing on A, option B is much more helpful because it reveals the pain points the brand can tap into. The brand can then create messaging to position an answer to the customer’s need: A hassle-free gym experience that can easily fit into a hectic life.

So how can you achieve this type of focus on your customers, what happens to your personas, and how can you best identify their pain points?

How can you build a more effective persona?

 

We’ve established that demographic attributes are not optimal. Instead, brands should aim to truly understand their customers’ pain points, offer a solution, and engage them throughout the customer lifecycle.

To achieve this, ask yourself these four essential questions when building your personas:

1. Think: What are the pain points your audience thinks about? They might demonstrate it in their actions or behaviors.

   • For example: “I really need to get healthy, and this gym seems interesting, but life is too busy” or "This gym seems great, I’ll go and find out more”

2. Say: What would your audience be more likely to say? Some of their actions and behaviors – or even interactions – might indicate they are looking for answers.

   • For example: “I should exercise, but I can’t spend one hour travelling to the premises for one hour of workout” or "Could I do a trial at this gym to make sure I like it?”

3. Feel: How do these pain points make them feel? Focus your attention on these emotions and what your audience really cares about.

   • For example: “I’m disheartened and stressed” or “I’m intrigued”

4. Do: What is their current behavior based on these thoughts and feelings? And pay attention to what they don’t do.

   • For example: They carry on their existing routine and don’t take any action, or they go online to find out more.

See, understand, and act

 

Traditional marketing using isolated data falls short. Marketers need to find ways to identify prospects and customers’ challenges by not only capturing signals and behavioral data but also making sense of it: what do they mean to me as a brand?

Once you understand the audience’s broad pain points and the associated feelings and behaviors, you can decide what needs to be done to boost engagement at every stage of the journey, and you can start building a framework for each persona.

This framework will define the role your brand could play to nudge people into making a purchase and eventually becoming an engaged advocate for your brand. It focuses on these two components:

• Which desired behavior change do you want your brand to affect?

• Which assets do you want to leverage to affect this change?

How can Acoustic Connect help?

 

Our professional services team can help you develop this framework that takes persona-based marketing beyond the who and gets to what matters. And, to learn more about how you can go beyond personas to truly understand your customers, watch the on-demand replay of our Fwd: Thinking virtual event with Omar Johson, B2H: Business to human marketing and marketing 3.0 — what’s next?