3 Tips To Successfully Identify Audience Personas

Audience personas, sometimes referred to as marketing or buyer personas, have been at the heart of marketing for generations. They represent the fictional, or generalized, representations of an ideal customer. Finance Manager Lisa, IT Joe, and even Homeowner Doug, can all help your marketing and sales teams connect with the intended audience. But, how much do you really know about your audience personas? Are you asking the right questions to successfully identify the people who will help your business grow and reach new heights?

3 Tips To Create Audience Personas

A properly created audience persona can help your marketing and sales teams relate to current and potential customers on a more human level. In fact, having a deep understanding of your audience personas is a critical component to creating content, developing products or services, and generating sales. The following three tips can help you to identify and create the right audience personas for your business.

1. Start with your current contacts. — Dig through your contacts database to discover any trends about how your current customers find and consume content. These trends will help you to better understand how people relate to your content. Once you understand how they relate and consume your content, you can then begin to look for common characteristics (as well as outliers), which will form the basis of your personas.
2. Use form fields on your contact page. — Contact us forms are a great way to capture valuable persona information. Through these forms you can better understand if there are common characteristics amongst the people or businesses who reach out to your company. Once again, these characteristics will be used to help you identify what separates a Finance Manager Lisa from a Homeowner Doug, and most importantly how you can tailor your marketing messages to better connect with these individuals.
3. Interview customers and prospects. — Interviews are a great way to discover why someone likes your product or services. Be sure to ask questions that fit certain topics, such as demographics, buying habits, and geographic location. You should also ask specific product or service specific questions that reveal why certain persons like or dislike your company’s offerings.

Once you have created your audience personas, it is important that you clearly relay this information to your sales and marketing teams. Be sure to include descriptive mannerisms and buzzwords that will help your teams identify certain personas when they are interacting with prospects. The moral of the story is simple, successfully identifying your audience personas will help your business grow and reach new heights.