Understanding the Concept of a Persona

The person beyond your target market

Really understanding the concept of a persona is one of the most important aspects of working within an inbound marketing strategy. The first thing to grasp is that your customer persona is not your target market, they are the actual person you are trying to target with your marketing efforts.

In most cases your persona will be an imaginary representation of your ideal target customer, having an understanding of the actual person who is an ideal customer will become really powerful for your inbound marketing strategy.

What is a Persona in Inbound Marketing

To start with, I am going to break down HubSpot’s definition of a persona:

Personas are fictional, generalised characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behaviour patterns among your real and potential customers.

As you can see the concept of a persona looks into more tangible and actionable aspects of your target customer. Unlike demographic type pieces of intelligence about your ideal customer such as a job title and country of residence, psychographic information such as an ideal customer’s goals and objectives can immediately provide you with a better understanding of this person. This understanding of your persona can then be applied to all phases of your inbound marketing strategy.

Psychographic Persona Data v Demographic Persona Data

An understanding of your target market is a very important part of any markers planning and strategy. It does have its limitation with providing actionable value to inbound marketing strategy, that is why we need to develop an understanding of our customer personas.

Knowing how important content marketing is for all companies, being able to create content on demographic target marketing information is not an effective way to attract and engage customers. Leveraging upon your understanding of the psychographic information of your customers such as their pain points and the challenges they are facing can immediately be used in your content marketing strategy to attract and convert customers.

Develop your Personas

Hopefully at this stage you have a good understanding of the concept of a persona, the next activity for a business is to develop your personas and start thinking about how you would use the information in your marketing campaign with your content, your campaign offers and your nurturing strategies.

If you need some help developing your Personas drop me an email, leave a comment below or check out this handy tool that guides you through the process of creating personas.