Using Personas to Achieve Your Marketing Strategy

Using Personas to Achieve Your Marketing Strategy

By breaking your visitors into categories and creating a persona based on the characteristics of each category, you can more effectively target your customers. Here's how the process works.

Compile information about your visitors. Use whatever information you have at hand: website traffic analytics; comments made by visitors in your free forums; the physical locations of customers; surveys or questionnaires; etc. The more information you have to help you create a persona, the better.

Divide the information up into categories of consumer. Generally, four or five personas are standard, although depending on your product or business, you may wind up with fewer or more. Don't get too specialized, and really try to come up with discrete groups of consumers.

Create individual personas, one for each category you've come up with. The data alone won't tell the entire story; you need to project and infer and generally imagine the different types of people who use your product. What are their names? Where do they live? What ages are they? How much money do they make annually? What do they do in their spare time? Get as specific as possible when creating your personas; it will help you craft targeted marketing strategies.

Now that you have your personas, it's time to use them. Here are a handful of specific marketing strategies where personas are helpful.

Email marketing. If you're reaching out to prospective consumers via email marketing, then you should create tailored messages for each persona, changing (if necessary) everything from the font to the formatting (HTML v. text) to the subject line to the content. If you're able to break up your email list according to which is more like your persona, then send out your messages accordingly; if not, use the email crafted for the persona you think is most represented by the mailing list. If you don't get a great response, try the next persona on your list in a week or two.

Keyword selection. Now that you have your personas created, think about what keywords they would use when searching for your products. Referring back to our original examplepictures of dogs wearing beaniesyou might find a way to weave in the following (very different) keywords: adorable dog beanies, hilarious dog beanies, sexy dog handlers.

Web page design. When you design your own free website, you should create different parts of your site based on the different personas you've created. That may mean separate product pages for adorable beanies and for ironic ones; the important thing is that your website is built to house all of your key personas without too much cross pollination. Obviously, trying to appeal to everyone on one web page is impossible, which is why you need to think carefully about your website's architecture and design.

Personas are a powerful tool in an online marketer's tool kit. They allow you to focus in on a few specific types and adjust your messages and designs accordingly, instead of simply aiming for either the lowest common denominator or trying to be all things to all people. This approach will pay dividends for your ecommerce website or business website.

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