Does Creating a Persona for Business Help or Hinder?

To learn more about your audience or target market, you can create polls, hold contests or monitor social media. You can also create a persona, a fabricated character who embodies the most common aspects of your customers. A persona helps you better understand your customers, which in turn helps you better serve their needs.

Admittedly, creating a persona for business takes some time and effort. Is creating a persona worth the effort? The answer depends on how you use it. Once completed, you can leverage your persona — or personas, since you may have multiple customer types — in a number of business-related activities, including:

• Creating targeted content for your website, blog and social media
• Building successful advertising and marketing campaigns
• Redesigning your products and services to better meet your customers’ needs

Whether you’re a solopreneur or a large corporation, developing personas for your business can help you succeed by outmaneuvering your competition and better serving your market. In fact, it can become an ongoing exercise, or at least a task you return to again and again, to check in with your customers to make sure you’re still offering the most appropriate goods and services.

How Do I Start Building a Persona?

The first step toward a persona is confirming basic information about your customer set or sets. For example, Ray Access has two primary customers to serve:

1. Individual businesses, including business owners and marketing directors
2. Online agencies, such as web developers and SEO firms who need content for their clients

You must identify the customer sets you serve. Are you selling to online retail companies who want to increase their marketing presence? Maybe you serve growing businesses that need a simple solution for payroll. Whatever your market, you need to define it. Then you can begin collecting the information that will confirm your market … or point you in a whole new direction.

What Information Does a Persona for Business Require?

You don’t need complicated or expensive software to start the process of developing a persona for business. A spreadsheet will suffice. But you have to know which information to collect or record for all your customers. And for any information that you don’t know, you must discover. Start with some basic information, such as:

• Geographic location (city and state)
• Gender and age, if relevant
• Income level and education
• Job title with their company
• Outstanding problems they have to solve
• Company goals when buying from your business
• Where they search for answers, including search engines, social media, competitor websites, print material or conferences
• How much each customer spends with your company and how often they return

Make sure to include this information from all your existing customers, but you may be able to get some of this data from prospective customers, such as those who’ve visited your website or signed up for your newsletter. The more information you collect, the more specific (and the more useful) your persona for business becomes. This step requires some effort.

How Do I Build My Persona?

Collecting the information is the most time-intensive part of building a persona. You can get some of this data from your website analytics and past interactions with your customers. To get more information, you may need to come up with a short list of pointed questions, and then send them (by email or better, by phone) to your past customers.

Then comes the fun part: building a persona for business. You can follow several steps to complete your persona, including:

1. Gather aggregated data and come up with an average for each category. For example, where are most of your customers located?
    
2. List each point to build a character. For example: write down the average age, income level, job title, gender and home of your average customer.
    
3. Give your persona a name, such as: George or Wendy.
    
4. Find a photo that approximates what your persona may actually look like.
    
5. Put it all together in a large format that you can hang on the wall. The photo and peripheral information give you and your team an image of the exact person you’re trying to reach.

How Do I Use My Persona for Business?

Your team can now imagine your persona when creating content and marketing. How they reach your persona is the key to the whole exercise, but knowing whom you’re trying to attract can streamline your content creation. You’re writing to a specific person, instead of an amorphous “market.”

At Ray Access, the writers and editors believe in finding the market you’re trying to reach. A persona for business helps define the audience. They don’t start writing until they know who they’re writing for. You should do the same.

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Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.