With many firms currently remote working due to the coronavirus, we thought we’d revisit how to create an online persona for your business.
As you adjust to the current situation you may find you are reevaluating business strategy which includes your marketing strategy and inbound marketing campaigns. At the core of this plan should be an online persona for your business. This provides you or your business development and marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client.
If this is not something you’ve looked at doing before, now could be a good time to take stock and really delve into who your target audience is. This way, when you start to ramp up activity in a few months, you will be in a good position to hit the ground running.
Who is your audience?
If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting to reach. Start with questions such as:
- Who does your company identify with? Be data driven. Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
- Who are your long-standing clients?
- Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
- Are the business you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?
Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?
Creating your persona
These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.
The beauty of this exercise in setting up a persona is that it’s something you can easily do yourself with a few simple steps. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with a colleague (via video conference!) can help you get the persona into shape. Questions to ask to build your persona include:
- What’s the person’s age?
- Where do they live?
- What’s their job role and sector they work in?
- Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
- Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.
Once you start to answer these, you can quickly begin to see a personality form in front of you.
Create a visual record of your persona
We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.
Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for campaigns.
Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:
- How you help them
- The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
- Your one-line elevator pitch
The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. The reason being is that you want a coordinated approach to your sales and marketing so that you have consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.
Get a head start with your marketing persona
By taking time to understand the needs of your target audience you can begin to understand what channels would be best for a digital marketing campaign. Right now you could use your persona to help you refresh the content on your website or add a blog page and use the right tone of voice in your social media marketing.
By adding fresh content to your website you’re maintaining presence while keeping your customers informed. You’re also keeping your website optimised which assists with your search engine rankings.
With this persona to hand you will really understand the wants and needs of your target audience.
Keep an eye on our blog over the coming weeks for further digital marketing tips and advice from Smart Cow, an inbound marketing agency in London.