Linking Your Personas and Target Audiences

LINKING YOUR PERSONAS AND TARGET AUDIENCES
Fundamentally, to run a campaign we need to; create a message that we want to communicate, and find a way to get that message to our customers.  The first involves linking what we offer (supply) with desires that would be satisfied by what we offer (demand).  The second involves identifying people who have those desires.  Building personas helps with the first and using target audiences helps with the second.  Both however need to be linked, usually through a segmentation.

Personas

The most effective campaigns engage emotionally with people[i]. Campaigns with emotional content perform twice as well as campaigns with only rational content in terms of profitability (31% vs 16%).  Building a persona allows us to make a segment feel like real people so that we can bring in that emotional connection.  Personas allow us to identify; thoughts, sensations, behaviors, and moods that these people are likely to have.  With that we can start building a story, identify possible journeys, and create emotional content.  This requires building empathy.

Check out this excellent blog by Artifacia[ii] on examples of personas for retail



Target Audiences

We can use characteristics of the segment to aid us in getting our content to the right people.
Examples of characteristics are:
  • Demographics (age, salary, marital status, education, occupation, etc.,)
  • Geographic (zip code, country, city/countryside, etc.)
  • Behavioral (benefits sought, usage, loyalty, etc.)
  • Psychographics/lifestyle (opinions, attitudes, personal values, channel, etc.)
Platforms such as Google and Facebook are effective at matching people to these characteristics as long as they can be defined for them.

Segment

Getting your segment is the first step before getting to Personas and Target Audiences.  This can be achieved by setting a criterion or criteria that differentiates your current customers based on how you value them.  A few examples are:
  • Recency – when was the last time the shopped with you
  • Frequency – how many orders have the made over the last period
  • Monetary value – how much have they spent with you
Once you have segmented then you can feed those characteristics into generating personas and target audiences.


What personas do you use and how do you create your target audiences?

[i] Pringle H., Field P., 2008, Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper, Institute of Practitioners in Advertising
[ii] Verma S., Nov 2016, 12 Buyer Personas for Online Retail Shoppers, http://blog.artifacia.com/12-buyer-personas-for-online-retail-shoppers/

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