How To Define Your Business' Target Customer For Marketing

If you’ve never heard of marketing personas or reader profiles then get comfortable and grab a cup of tea because we’re about to go through our complete guide about how you can utilise this technique to your business’ advantage. The idea behind creating these personas is to describe the various types of reader/customer that your business receives which then leaves you with a picture of who you are targeting – you can then use that to inspire your future campaigns and marketing efforts. In this way, you can better meet your audience’s needs.

What Is a marketing persona?

Adele Revella (2012) described marketing personas perfectly for us so we thought we would begin by sharing what she said in her eBook, ‘The Buyer Persona Manifesto’: “I define a buyer persona as an archetype; a composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the one you market, based on what you’ve learned in direct interviews with real buyers. They key point here is actually talking to buyers. If your buyer personas are based on generic or internal ideas about your buyers, your content won’t be any better than what it was before you had personas.”

How to get started

We would recommend starting by making a few big mind-maps to represent these personas – generally 4-6 is a good number because it means that there aren’t so many to get you confused, but enough to cover the majority of your consumers. So, what basic information should you include in each persona? The content you provide will depend on your business, but we recommend starting off with the following:

Give them a name – it doesn’t have to be anything serious you can have fun with this!
Where do they work?
What is their age, gender, location, education status, salary?
Do they have children?
What do they enjoy doing with their life?
What do they value? What do they dislike?

You want to aim towards this person’s values and goals when you are planning your marketing efforts. In this way, you can internalise the type of person that you are trying to attract and ultimately make your ‘sales’ seem a lot more human.

Keep your eyes peeled for part two of this article series which will be out at the beginning of next week!