Moving from understanding to engaging

How well does your organization know the customers you are trying to reach?

• Do you understand what they care about?
• Can you empathize with the problems they are trying to solve?
• Do you know how they get information, and what (or who) influences their decision to buy something?

As marketers, how do we go from researching quantitative and qualitative insights about our target audience to having a useful way to communicate and align with who that person is when developing strategies?

Enter user personas.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a detailed portrait of a fictional person representing a key audience segment.  
Personas allow us to synthesize attributes into concise, actionable insights that are memorable and easily communicated. Shifting the internal conversations about audiences from a demographics list into a relatable person with pain points, needs, specific behaviors and personality. 
When developed correctly, user personas ensure that every team member (and outside partner) has a unified understanding of who you’re trying to reach. A typical persona would include:

• Demographics — age, gender, education, household income, number of children 
• Psychographics — personal values, daily routines, hobbies, and habits
• Media consumption — what they watch, read, and listen to, including traditional media, social media, and all formats in between; what devices they use to go online and for how many hours per week 
• Challenges and pain points — what factors are driving their buying decisions, and what problems are they trying to solve 
• Buying behaviors specific to your industry, service, or product 

To bring user personas to life as a relatable person, we typically give them a name, photo, short biography, and quote that crystallizes what drives their buying behavior.
 
For B2C personas, we include information such as brand affinity, product/service preferences, purchase drivers, and top channels where they’re researching.
 
For B2B personas making purchase decisions for a company, we include their job title and responsibilities, subject matter expertise, and role in the company’s decision to buy a product or service. Additionally, we will develop ideal customer profiles (ICPs), and profiles to represent full buying groups. These various tools allow us to customize our strategies appropriately. 

How do user personas inform marketing strategy and content development?

Rather than using a “one-size-fits-all” approach, marketers can segment their messaging to resonate with the specific motivations of each persona vs simply targeting based on demographics.

To highlight the use of a persona — you wouldn’t try to sell a product to King Charles III and Ozzy Ozbourne in the same way, would you? Of course not. They’re vastly different people, with different needs, buying preferences, barriers, etc. However, they belong to the same demographic — men between the ages of 65-75, who live in the United Kingdom, and have a high net worth. If you were to develop your marketing strategy simply on those demographics vs the type of person you’re marketing to, your program would fall flat.

With a properly developed user persona, you can create specific go-to-market plans tailoring marketing messages, content production, and channel mix that will resonate appropriately.

Creating a persona-driven culture: aligning teams around the customer

While user personas are essential to marketing efforts, they are equally important for a brand’s internal alignment and culture. Other customer-focused departments can use that same persona to align their engagement or retention strategies, and even inform product development. This shared understanding ensures that everyone, from creative teams to sales, is centered around the same data set creating a better experience for the customer and better long-term business impact for you.

To truly leverage the power of personas, organizations must focus on cultivating an internal culture where personas are not static documents but dynamic tools that are revisited and refined based on ongoing customer insights and market changes. By anchoring every decision around a nuanced understanding of the customer, companies can create marketing that resonates and businesses that thrive.

Can artificial intelligence play a role in creating user personas?

Just as AI is impacting every industry, AI tools and automation are changing the way we develop and update personas. AI-powered solutions and platforms are enabling marketers to analyze large data sets quickly and refine personas, as needed. This efficiency allows marketers to focus more on the use of the personas.

As always, the use of AI should be transparent. At Brunner, we define clear use cases for AI, ensuring that both internal teams and clients understand how and why it’s being used.

Ready to better use your audience insights?

User personas help connect the dots across all your marketing, from content strategy and integrated planning to creative campaigns and channel deployment. And they support organizational alignment by fostering a culture of empathy that focuses on providing value to customers.

If you’re ready to explore user personas and audience-first marketing, we’d love to chat about the challenges you’re facing and the goals you’re trying to reach. Please feel free to contact us for a conversation!