At MHP/Team SI, we do not believe it’s enough to simply “define” your target audience; we believe you need to know them. When creating an omnichannel TraDigital™ marketing communications strategy, we can focus on the group as a whole and think about how to reach the masses with our client’s message, but sometimes it’s most helpful to think of your target audience as individuals. That’s where personas come in.
When we look at all the research we’ve done on your audience, we create a persona of who we will keep in mind when developing your marketing communications strategy.
A persona is a character representation of your target audience. It puts a “name” and a “face” to those you want to reach. We take the most common characteristics of your audience to create this “person.” We name them, give them a job, a family and place to live. And then, we think about what they watch, what they listen to, what is their routine like, who are they influenced by, etc. Then, when it’s time to create the strategy, it’s easier to picture these individuals and not just a collective group.
Depending on the overall audience, we might create several different personas to represent different segments of the audience. It’s important that we don’t just create a fictitious person from thin air, but we use data and research to back up the persona’s details.
Creating a persona ensures that we know and understand your audience. We can get in their head and better know the opportunities for them to connect and interact with your brand.
It also helps us think through their customer journey from awareness to action and what pain points they may encounter along the way.
We not only think about personas when it comes to the overall strategy, but we think about how every piece of content developed should reach one of our personas along their customer journey and address a pain point or potential obstacle that would prevent them from doing business with our clients. From social media posts to outdoor boards to video, everything is written with a persona in mind.
We also understand that personas are going to change as time passes and as your business changes. That’s why it’s important that we revisit them to see if they are still who we are targeting or if we need to add a new persona to represent a new segment of your audience. We make sure that they are always accurate representations of your audience so we know exactly who we are trying to reach and engage in all of our messaging.
