How to Use Marketing Personas to Focus Online Marketing

In simple terms, marketing personas are the fictional representations that your company creates to reflect your ideal customer. You will define certain personas by carefully assessing your current customers – making notes on their needs, behaviors, concerns, and goals. Once you have learned these crucial characteristics, you will be able to structure your web presence, social profiles, and inbound marketing techniques more effectively.

Defining Marketing Personas

Most of the time, a business will sell its services or products to numerous types of customer. For especially small businesses, it’s usually a good idea to keep your marketing personas as simple as possible. Start by using information that you know to be true about your current customer base to establish a basic foundation for your buyer. This information should include gender ratios, age ranges, psychological profiles, locations, and interests. Then, analyze the customers that you already have and discover what encourages them to buy from you instead of your competitors.

How to Use Marketing Personas

Once you have accurately identified what your marketing personas are going to be, you can use them to plan activities that are focused on your ideal client. You might implement some of the following measures:

• Blog posts or articles regarding the concerns and questions that your personas have about your business style, product, or anything else.
• Use the information gained from your personas to guide your visitors through your website as easily as possible. When your visitor sees that you understand what they need, they are more likely to follow the path that you have set for them.
• Website content – once you can accurately navigate your personas through your website, you will need to write the content that appeals to their needs. Understanding what your ideal client wants from your website will help you to deliver content about your services and products that educate your visitor and entices them to buy.
• Search engine optimization – Defining your market personas will help you to better understand the ways in which your market searches for the solutions that they need – helping you to discover which phrases and words should be used to optimize your site.

By learning as much as possible about your ideal client, you will be able to make more informed decisions about the activities you engage in through marketing. Sometimes, a motion as simple as adjusting the hours of your service to better accommodate your client's schedules, adding solutions for their concerns, or providing content that they prefer will increase your value to them significantly.