Persona

Another word for a persona is a customer profile or marketing persona. Within marketing, the term persona is used for several reasons. The biggest reason is to describe the ideal customer for your business. By sketching a persona of the ideal customer, you can research how best to reach them. When creating a persona, you create a detailed description of the (fictional) ideal customer. Of course, not every customer is the same. Therefore, it is important to put the most important characteristics together to create an "average ideal" client. This description of the average ideal client includes information such as:

• Age - From your customer data it is often possible to calculate the average age
• Gender - Are your products/services geared more toward men, women or otherwise?
• Family situation - Independent, single parent, dorm, etc.
• Position - Retired or just busy as a manager
• Work - Office work, store assistant, etc.
• Hobbies - Drawing, reading certain magazines, photography, etc.
• Challenges - Likes to take time before making a purchase or wants an upscale shopping experience
• Values - Friends and family, likes to travel, relaxation

A persona usually has three to five points from the above examples. This depends entirely on your business. You can also have more than one persona, such as a persona by product or service.

Creating and deploying a persona 

Creating a persona can be helpful for different departments within your company. Here you can think of the marketing team, customer service, content team and sales team. For the content team, the persona can be used to know who the target audience is. Content marketers can thereby better identify topics and choose a (writing) style. For example, for CEOs, the writing style will be more professional than for young students as the target audience. Thus, a persona for each department can serve as a tool to better target the audience.

To create a persona, it is important to find out who the customers are. You can approach the customers directly or through other routes. Use data from the customers that can be obtained through all channels used. Social media, emails with surveys or Google analytics provide a lot of real-time data. This data can be more reliable because it measures real information. Then choose the most important aspects for the persona for your business to make it complete.