How to Create Personas in 4 Steps for Your Marketing (with a Free Template)

Content marketing is all about connection. You want the stories you tell to grab attention, attract people, and make a strong impact. But how do you do this effectively? Contrary to popular belief, good content marketing doesn’t start with a good idea (shocking, I know). It starts with understanding who you are trying to reach through your content. That’s why you need to define personas for your marketing campaign.

This simple tool is the secret to telling stories that resonate and create lasting relationships.

Why Every Content Team Needs Marketing Personas

According to the “OnBrand 2017 State of Branding Report,” only 47% of respondents said their strategy included a deep understanding of marketing personas. This isn’t surprising. Many people are creating content marketing the wrong way.

Often, marketers look at their story ideas by asking: “Would I be interested in this?” This is a big mistake. Content marketing isn’t about what your brand wants or what you are interested in. It’s about what the people you are trying to reach are interested in. It sounds simple and even obvious, but how can we understand what people are interested in if we don’t stop to “listen” and “ask”?

Good content marketing is a channel between a brand and its customer, allowing the brand to deliver meaningful, useful, and valuable content that people need and want based on their aspirations or problems. But many marketers don’t fully understand what these customers’ needs are or even who they are.

Instead, they create content without a clear idea of who they are trying to educate, engage, or inspire, and then send content out to everyone with the blind hope that someone, somewhere, will come across what they created and like the topic. Unsurprisingly, this content usually fails.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Marketing personas can save the day. They fill in the blanks, helping you intimately understand the people you are trying to reach: the problems they’re dealing with, the issues that affect them, their secret hopes and aspirations, the things that motivate them (whether they know it or not), and more.

What Are Personas for Marketing Strategies?

In essence, personas are a combination of character traits, someone’s attributes (such as age, demographics, and geography), and psychographic information (lifestyle, personality, and values). All this combined serves as a representation of a real human being you want to attract. It is important to highlight at the beginning that personas go far beyond the target audience. Data from a target audience study usually includes location, age group, gender, and social class. These are important but superficial pieces of information that, on their own, will make your communication with your client very shallow.

Basically, marketing personas are a comprehensive “map” of people’s minds and personalities, helping you see the world from their perspective. With this X-ray superpower, you can find, evaluate, and adapt your ideas to fill the gaps, ensuring your content is engaging and relevant.

This not only provides a great advantage over your competitors but also facilitates genuine relationships with your creative team, focusing work efforts and highlighting information they want and the information they didn’t even know they would need. This is extremely beneficial for two simple reasons:

1. People are more receptive to what you have to say if they perceive you as someone who adds value to their lives. Having the same line of thought, the same language, and even having felt the same pain are powerful concepts for creating instant empathy with the audience.
2. This greatly facilitates the creation of content ideas, as it reduces the assumptions that lead to wrong or irrelevant ideas.

If you want to do content marketing well, you need marketing personas.

How to Create Marketing Personas in 4 Steps

There are many ways to create marketing personas. The internet is full of creation processes. So why don’t most companies and agencies create them? Simply because personas cannot be created based on assumptions raised in a meeting. It requires the use of concrete data and even research to answer questions about people’s behavior, and this can seem intimidating and discouraging, which is why some marketers give up completely or end up with semi-formed personas that don’t really give them the insights they need.

Because we don’t want you to be paralyzed, we’ve broken down the process into simple steps, including our best tips (and a free template) to make this creation as easy as possible. Whether you’re starting from scratch or need to review your marketing personas, here’s how to do them in the best way we understand.

But be careful: We base our marketing personas on real people we’ve negotiated with, met, and worked with over the years. This makes the process faster and saves some steps. (This is definitely one of the best ways to start, rather than starting from scratch.)

Now, if you’re just starting from scratch or working on product-market fit, don’t worry! The work may take a little longer and require more trial and error. We recognize that not everyone has the luxury of starting work with clients or having worked in the creative field.

Step 1: Ask the Right Questions

On the surface, the people you’re trying to reach probably aren’t a homogeneous group. They have different fears, concerns, and worries, but they have one thing in common: they might use your product or service. So, your goal in creating personas starts by finding the similarities. Start by asking:

• What do they have in common? What do they want or need help with?
• How do these things relate to your product/service? How can you satisfy these desires or solve these problems through content?

To discover this, you’ll need to talk directly to your people. But first, you need to identify what you really want to know about them. You can identify a million attributes, from favorite podcasts to preferred workout types, but it’s important to highlight what is most relevant. Once you know what you’re looking for, you can better tailor the questions you ask.

To get started, make a copy of our free marketing persona template spreadsheet. This is a sample of the type of demographic and psychographic information you’ll want to define. You can add, edit, or adjust relevant items as you see fit.

Pay special attention to the work challenge questions, as they directly represent what people deal with in their daily lives. These questions also address issues such as the problems they are trying to solve, as well as the risks they are trying to mitigate.

We’ve found that the focus of these answers is to facilitate the development of new high-level content ideas, while some of the other answers, like interests, hobbies, or age, are useful items to consider when developing the tone, design aesthetic, and other communication elements.

We know that some of the geographic or psychographic information may seem tedious or unnecessary for creating good content marketing ideas. But if this information helps you better understand who you’re trying to reach, the more information you have, the better and clearer your content will be. Initially, it will be common to try to gather as much information as possible, but over time, you will know what is most important in each stage of your creation process.

Step 2: Talk to People

You might, like us, have a long-standing relationship with your customers and a deep understanding of their needs and desires, but it’s still important to eliminate assumptions. Go directly to the source to find out as much as you can. You might consider doing this in the “research” phase of creating marketing personas.

Your goal is to find out as much information as possible about the people you’re trying to reach, to find common topics and fill your marketing personas with plenty of detail.

There are several ways to get this information. You can ask questions through chats, calls, and emails or in person. You can conduct customer surveys or gather feedback online. (It’s also helpful to get feedback from sales and customer service at this stage, talking both to the sales team and the end customers).

Ultimately, the goal is to have as much information as needed to develop complete and real marketing personas.

Step 3: Consolidate Your Answers

Once you’ve collected your answers, gather your team to consolidate and condense. Look closely at everything and analyze your research to identify the topics, concerns, hopes, desires, and challenges people face. But what should I look for in a huge amount of information? Remember our Step 1. Look for themes or phrases that commonly appear in the answers. These are great indicators of convergence among people that should be explored.

At this stage, you want to draft your marketing personas. Set aside an hour or 90 minutes, depending on how fast you work and how many people you’re trying to map. (It’s important to take at least 20 to 30 minutes per person.)

First, identify how many personas you will create (at least three are useful to start with).

Wait a minute. So, I won’t have one persona per product or service? No, when we do persona work here at the agency, we segment personas as people who work in the same organization at different hierarchical levels or lengths of service. (If you’re panicking, keep reading; it will all work out.) It’s important to point out that there’s no right or wrong way to do this. Your company, goals, and resources should dictate your approach to how many marketing personas you want to create.

Next, start debating the attributes of each identification element in your template, based on your research. Write everything down and refine as you go, so you have a concise list of attributes for each question. For example, you might have three to five items for “fears,” while you might have a range for “age” (e.g., 35 to 45).

We find it helpful to put this on a whiteboard first. This allows our team to stay focused and interact in real-time. It also helps people understand the whole picture. In the end, you should have a loosely defined group of personas.

Step 4: Finalize Your Personas

Once you have your personas roughly shaped, it’s time to refine and examine them. Make sure you have a name for each and circulate your personas to get feedback from relevant people (e.g., your sales team or company founder). Once refined, save everything in a Google Doc or Excel spreadsheet that is easily accessible by teams.

Use these finalized personas to brainstorm content. In the future, you should be able to identify:

• Which persona will be interested in the idea.
• Why this persona will be interested in the idea or product.

In a constantly moving world, everything changes all the time, and your client, audience, and supplier are no different. That’s why it’s important to review your personas from time to time, especially when you notice your advertising campaigns and content are losing their impact with them.

Remember: Always Put Content First

The best way to get people to listen to what you’re trying to say is to first become useful to them. You can do this by teaching them something new or creating something they simply find interesting or fun. If you can become a reference in a certain content area (instead of just having the task of communicating as a brand), people will be more receptive and attracted to your content.

Of course, there are millions of things that influence and affect your content creation, from departmental guidelines to your editorial calendar. Fortunately, besides marketing personas, there are several things you can do to ensure your content is as effective as possible.

• Make sure your strategies are aligned. Document your brand strategy to ensure your content strategy supports your final goals.
• Tell a consistent story.
• Measure your success. Make sure you are tracking the right metrics for your content strategy.
• Use empathy when brainstorming.
• Build the right team.
• Bring in reinforcements. If you are struggling to get content consistently, you may need extra help.

If you need more help for your company or business, contact Agência Baloodesign. We would love to talk about how we can improve your content strategy. Get in touch here.