A Guide to Creating Audience Personas
How to better understand your customers and make sure your brand meets them where they’re at.
Knowing your target audience is a big deal. This is true whether your product/service is an everyday part of life or super niche.
For your brand to reach the right people, you first need a clear idea of who those people are, what they care and worry about, what motivates them, and how they make choices.
Image: Maira Kalman
A car company needs to define their target audience just as clearly as, say, a retailer selling tiny denim jackets for dogs (awww!!). Even though cars are everyday objects, the company still needs to develop a clear picture of what defining characteristics like occupation and lifestyle will affect purchasing behavior. A gardener with a big family living in a rural town probably gravitates towards a different car than someone who works in an urban office and has no kids. The car company will have a broader audience than the dog jacket folks, but knowing their target audience is equally important for both brands. Regardless of scale and scope, your brand is best served when you’re clear on who’s are already out there and in the market, rather than casting a wide net and hoping for the best.
Brand strategy is determined in large part by your target audience. But, you can’t know or speak to each individual person in your audience. That’s literally impossible, and unless you have lots of customer experience data (which is unlikely unless you’re a large or established company), how can you make a reasonable assessment of what your audience will look like?
That’s where creating audience personas comes in.
What is an audience persona?
An audience persona (commonly referred to as “buyer persona”) is a creative way of using market segmentation. It’s a profile of a fictional character that embodies notable traits of a definable group within your target audience. By combining broader characteristics with individualized ones, you can identify how to reach people and deliver messaging appropriate to their particular life experiences.
Our brains are evolved to view things in narrative terms, so building a story around your audience adds realism. You can’t know each individual, nor do you want to over-generalize. The sweet spot is to have multiple imaginary people to represent various groups within your target audience. These profiles are tools for strategizing, designing, writing copy, marketing, advertising, product development—all the things!
To build audience personas, you need to gather several types of information. Here’s what to focus on:
DEMOGRAPHICS
This is information like age, location, occupation, income, gender, familial status, and other basic characteristics. Since having multiple audience personas tends to yield a clearer picture, you’re likely to have diversity in certain demographic categories. To use the car company as an example, they might have an audience persona for different familial statuses: a person with a big family would be relevant for SUVs and minivans that can hold more people, and a person who’s single with no children might be relevant to a line of sports cars suited to one or two occupants.
PSYCHOGRAPHICS
These are abstract characteristics like beliefs, values, and lifestyles, that affect how people make choices. These are the traits that will help you know what your audience cares about and what moves them. This information speaks to how people live their lives and what’s important to them, and how your product/service relates to that. Knowing this allows you to tap into emotional appeal more easily. When building an audience persona for the person with a big family, our car company would know that safety is a major consideration when buying a car, and assign it as a value for that character.
CHALLENGES
Here is where you’ll figure out the needs and problems your audience deals with in their lives that your product/service addresses (also called “pain-points”). You need to be clear on how you are providing solutions for these challenges. As with all things human, there will be needs and problems that overlap between these personas, but each will have some specific to them. The car company knows that fuel efficiency is a big concern across the board, but it may be a higher priority for folks with family expenses than for a single person driving a sports car on weekends.
MEDIA, INFORMATION, & INFLUENCE
This defines the types of media sources and information your audience consumes, and whose voices they trust. By researching what information sources and platforms people use, you can determine what avenues would be best suited for outreach and marketing. Knowing what voices your audience trusts (brands, influencers, news networks, publications, etc.) helps you position yourself in relation to those sources. Our car company might hone in on where their personas would be researching cars or what celebrities might be influencing the types of cars they buy.
PERSONALITY
Now your imagination really comes into play. You can get into more detail by bringing all the above information together to create a picture of what this person is like. Combining their values and lifestyle preferences with what you know about their challenges and information sources gives you material to reveal their personality. You can get more granular imagining how this person makes decisions, what it’s like to be around them, their behaviors, and even appearance, if it’s relevant. Are they spontaneous or a thoughtful, considered decision maker? Are they introverted or extroverted? Do they crave new experiences or prefer the comfort of the familiar? Creating a personality fleshes out the humanness of these personas so they feel more like real people, making it easier to feel connected to them. Connection translates to insight into understanding your audience’s motivations and needs.
Let’s look at some examples for how all of this information might come together.
There are many ways this type of exercise might look, so a brand could have anywhere from three personas to ten. It all depends on the size of your business and the scope and complexity of your services. For the sake of simplicity, I’ve created two basic audience persona examples for on our imaginary car company to show what it might look like in practice. In the spirit of storytelling, I brought in a couple familiar characters as representatives. True, these characters wouldn’t have access to cars, but suspend your disbelief for the sake of the exercise.
Sam represents our example of the person with a big family. You can see how that small piece of demographic information gives us a lot to work with. It reveals what his motivations and priorities might be, and how the car company might provide real solutions to challenges this type of person would face.
Merry represents our single urban office worker. As with Sam, his familial status provides useful context in thinking about what his priorities are. No kids means having lots of space is probably less of a concern, leaving more room to consider things like style. While he might not be solely focused on practicality, the car company can realistically assume it’s still part of how he makes decisions and can incorporate that into his narrative. This nuance helps him seem more real, and thus representative of an actual potential target buyer.
How to gather customer data
All that stuff is well and good, but where do you get the information you use to create this profiles?
What tools you use to gather this data depends on your level of experience and knowledge in your market/niche, financial resources, and how much time you’re willing and able to spend on research.
If you’ve been at it in your industry for a while, maximize what you already have access to. Take stock of your own experiences and expertise: what do you already know? What patterns have you observed in your client/customer base? Think about questions, feedback, and challenges that come up a lot. Reach out to your existing audience and professional network. This is often the best place to start for qualitative research.
On a more formal level, there are two types of market research. Primary research is highly specific data that you gather yourself (or hire someone to gather for you). Secondary research will give you broader statistical information, like trends and economic indicators. Check out these resources to learn more about the market research process:
Understanding Market Research For Your Business Plan Forbes
Market Research: Information Sources for Small Business NY Public Library
8 ways to use social media for market research Sprout Social
Small Business Hub: A Research Guide for Entrepreneurs (Library of Congress)