PERSONAS

You Talkin’ To Me?!

This famous line by Robert Di Nero from the movie Taxi Driver has never been more applicable that in today’s online marketing communications. Today’s customer is indeed king and they are an exceptionally empowered person. Attention spans are at an all time low and your competition is no more than a click away. The answer to these obstacles is to make sure that all of your online communication is highly relevant to the person that you are communicating with.

Personas Defined

A persona is a character that represents

a person that is currently or potentially

involved with your company, your

products and/or your services.

These characters are developed to

include all of the details that would be

associated with a “real” person. Personas

are given names, their ages are identified,

occupations and demographic information

are detailed to assist in bringing this

character to life. Then, to increase the

business value of a persona, details of the

persona’s online goals and behaviors are

crated, relevant to the personas buying

personality.

Return On Effort

So...right now you’re probably wondering,

why should I go through all of this work,

where does all of this information come

from and what does a persona look like.

All very relevant points so lets answer each

of these points, one at a time.

The primary reason that you want to go

through this effort is so that the online

communication that you have with your

audience is more relevant to them. And,

you want your communication to be more

relevant because relevancy directly relates

to converting prospects into customers,

and increasing customers (regardless of

how you define customers) is exactly why

you are marketing your company, products

and/or services.

Who & What

The first step in developing your

personas starts with assembling the

appropriate information for each of your

personas. This information will cross

two characteristics; who the person is

that you are attempting to emulate

and how they will engage with your

company. The who part will identify a

lot of the demographic type of

information about each of your

personas. This will also include market

niche information about people’s jobs or

positions such as s “builder” or a “CEO”.

The who information is an important

characteristic that will play a role in what

this persona is looking for, from you.

What type of product, services and most

importantly, what type of information.

The how characteristic identifies the

mode that your persona will be in when

their interaction with you happens. This

how mode is directly related to the

buyers personality and aligns with one of

the four areas within the buyer

personality matrix (Fig 1).

You will notice where a person fits within

this personality matrix will have a

dominant impact on how this person will

look for the product, service, or information

that they are in search of.

Example

Let’s take the CEO of a prospective

company that would have a Methodical

personality. You can see by the personality

matrix that this person is going to be very

deliberate in their actions and very logical

in their thought process. This means that

they are going to visit your website more

than once during their decision process,

they will be on your site for a greater than

normal amount of time and they will visit a

greater than average number of pages

within your website (consequently, your

web presence will have to be of greater

substance for this person).

This persona will be searching out

information that is demonstrable of your

companies experience, knowledge and

skill-set. Evidence will be very important to

this persona to feel comfortable doing

business with you.

What Personas Look Like

There are a lot of ways that you can

present personas, but the best that we

have found is a layout that will allow the

reader the ability to see a picture of the

persona, read their name, gather some

information about their demographics

and then digest a small and quick

scenario about how they will be

interacting with your company. This will

provide you with an at a glance review of

the people that you are going to be

talking to, what they are interested and

how they want to digest this information.

This is the first step in segmenting your

audience and your communications to

those audience members and realizing

the largest single increase in the

relevance of your marketing effort for the

people that you want to be marketing to.

About 3Sixty Interactive

3Sixty Interactive is a professional agency

with over ten years of experience in the

digital world. They offer a variety of digital

marketing solutions that include search

engine optimization, digital advertising,

email marketing, social media, customized

strategy reports, analytics and

maintenance of your marketing plan.

Learn more about 3Sixty Interactive at

www.3sixtyinteractive.com or by calling us

at 1-877-43Sixty.