Today there’s a popular trend towards marketing with personas – fictitious customers, each representing a different market segment. When developing personas for your business, there are lots of variables to consider, such as age, geographic location, education, experience with your products, whether they’re avid Internet or social media users. The benefits you provide, offers you make, and media you use to communicate is likely to differ from one persona group to another.
For instance, a company selling a self-contained raised bed gardening system may have personas such as:
• City Susan, who grew up gardening, but now lives in a large city and only has a small patio on which to garden.
• Nancy Newbie, who has never gardened before in her life, and is looking for a foolproof system that provides ideal growing conditions.
• Downsizing Dan and Donna, who have been avid gardeners all their life, but are finding that the physical work of shoveling and weeding makes it too difficult to maintain their large traditional garden.
Descriptions of each marketing persona would be developed in much more detail, based on hard data.
There are two big benefits of using personas for marketing purposes.
One is that they put a human face on the customer. When developing products, writing catalog copy, or creating a blog, it’s helpful for everyone involved to have a picture in their mind of who their customers are.
The other benefit is that personas help marketers avoid the common trap of thinking “all customers are just like me.”
How about you? Have you tried using personas in your marketing? Have they been helpful?
