Personas are key to creating winning inbound marketing campaigns.
With each persona that you create, you essentially outline a potential or even current customer. A well thought out persona can provide ample help in generating a following of people that are interested in what your company offers.
The best personas are very well thought through, generated by teams of people from every department in the business. By creating these personas as a team, you are better able to understand how others see the persona and how you can modify your content to better reach them.
So how do you start? And what information do you need to have in a persona to reek the most benefit?
First off, creating a persona isn’t easy and it definitely should not be rushed. Take a large portion out of your day to sit down with people from different sides of your company and brainstorm. Take in account both personal and business life while brainstorming. To help we created a list of questions to brainstorm to create a worthwhile persona.
- What is their gender?
- What is their age range?
- Are they married? Single? Divorced? Widowed?
- Do they have children? How many?
- Where do they live now?
- Where are they originally from?
- What is their annual take-home income?
- Do they own their house? Rent?
- What is their highest education level?
- What school(s) (specifically) did they attend?
- Did they partake in extracurricular activities (sports team, sorority, fraternity, class office)?
- Do they have any certifications?
- What industry/company do they work in/for?
- How big is the industry/company?
- How long have they worked in/for that industry/company?
- What is their position title?
- What skills are required for their job?
- What does it mean to be successful to them?
- Where do they normally shop?
- Most recent purchase?
- Are they loyal to a brand?
I do realize that most of these questions can be answered in a simple form. That is what makes creating personas so challenging. To get the most out of them you should dive deep into each question and think of other information you can pull from it. Remember, the best personas help make creating content offers, blog posts, and emails extremely targeted and simple.
