When I first founded buyer persona development a dozen years ago, I used to get asked, "What is a buyer persona?" quite often. Nowadays, as I engage in conversations about buyer personas and buyer insights, I have to remind myself to ask what the person believes a buyer persona is.
When my kids were younger, and they were misbehaving either by doing something they shouldn't be or not doing what I asked them to do, I used to tease them by comparing them to their perfect brothe...
In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way. Marketers may use personas together with market segmentation, where the qualitative personas are constructed to be representative of specific segments.
Using personas in online marketing is not new. Among others conversion optimization practitioners, web developers and usability experts have been using personas for ages. By defining personas we put ourselves in the shoes of a "typical" target person and define processes by empathizing with them in a very detailed way so we can 'convert' them, directly or indirectly.
Marketing personas are imaginary versions of your prospects, customers and the public that contain in-depth, lifelike character traits including fun names to help develop content and marketing. Personas guide a firm's marketing and content decisions. To this end, here's a twelve point checklist to help you develop your firm's personas.
The identification and application of personas improved Development's efficiency and quality during the first development cycle in which they were used. In addition, the use of personas significantly improved corporate cohesiveness, focus and decision making at every level. In order to protect the company's privacy, the names of the company and its products have been changed.
With all of the data analysis used to drive online marketing strategy, it's important to remember that the audience of marketing materials are always people. While your marketing metrics can offer plenty of guidance in these efforts, your strategy needs to appeal to specific individuals.
If you've read my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR or spent time on my blog, you may recall that I stress the importance of "buyer personas." In fact, I believe they're one of the most fundamental aspects of great marketing.
Knowing your buyer isn't exactly a new idea. I first learned to interview buyers in the 80′s when I was with Regis McKenna, the PR firm that represented Apple, Intel and many other technology leaders at the time.
I recently came across the website for The Soil Association, the leading organic farming advocacy organization in the UK. The content impressed me for really digging into identifying its numerous buyer personas and building a site serving all these buyer personas effectively...
