1. What is their demographic information?

To perform more targeted offline and online marketing, collect demographic information about your personas. It also helps to paint the whole picture of who your personas are. For instance, are they married? Are they male or female? What’s their household income? How old are they? Where do they currently live? Do they have children? This is a great place to begin sketching your personas to be able to formulate a clearer definition of your customer type.

2. What is their job and level of seniority?

The level of importance you assign to your persona’s career and seniority level does depend on the product or service you’re selling. If you’re a B2B, this information becomes crucial. If your persona is at a senior management level, they are the ultimate decision-makers. This is where you need to really ‘WOW’ them, as opposed to someone at an introductory level that might not be able to make those purchasing decisions. Determining their goals is important to be able to cater the conversation to where it will appeal them. Communication is key in sales and marketing, therefore researching your persona’s career will direct you on how to approach the conversation to appeal to them.

3. What does a day in their life look like?

After gathering information about your persona’s characteristics, you can put together how a typical day in their life would run. Define the difference between where they are and where they would rather be. What their hobbies are, what kind of car they drive. Going through this exercise will help paint the picture of what your target audience. Therefore, you can keep the message you’re sending across consistent.

4. What are their pain points?

Think about it. You are in business because you’re solving a problem for your target audience. Go into detail, and focus on the clues that will tell you how the problem makes them feel.  For example, imagine your product is a Real Estate software system. You might have a persona who just got their Real Estate license. They probably are a little intimated by the prospects of finding the right homes for their clients. They will have a need for your product, however, you need to hit their pain points to make them realize that they need you. These pain points are going to differ from a more advanced agent who has years of experience under their belt. They still are in need of your product, however, the points you want to hit on will differ

5. Determine what their values and goals are:

What is it that they do and don’t care about? Ask yourself what would make your persona get excited about your product. For example, that fresh new Real Estate agent probably values a product that makes searching for homes easier and user-friendly. Address these pain points to paint the picture for your prospects.

What are their expectations? If a persona is looking for a product like the one you are offering, make it clear the expectations they should receive from using your product. Don’t oversell here, or build false expectations. A persona will appreciate honesty and a plain and simple explanation of the product.

8. What common objections are you getting?

If you anticipate the objections your persona might have, you will have the advantage of pre-empting them. Educate them on what you have to offer, and how it will better help their lives, and take away any fears right away. What would make them hesitant to buy your product from you or any competitors? What might be their fear of switching over to using your product from what they are currently using?

220 Marketing specializes in Online Marketing and Management for industries such as Insurance Marketing, Real Estate Marketing, and Mortgage Marketing.

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If you are struggling to come up with marketing campaigns that really get the attention you are looking for from your customers, doing a little research and creating personas for your key demographic will be well worth the time and investment you put into it. Here are six benefits to building personas for your customers and how to use them to your advantage.

1. An understanding of customer needs/interests: When trying to buy the perfect gift for a loved one, you can picture them in your mind while you’re shopping. Thinking about what they do for fun and what interests them helps you narrow down your search and figure out what to buy. Customer personas work in the same way in that they give you an idea of what your customers need and want, and help you get on a more personal level with them. By knowing the problems your customers have, you will be better able to find solutions for them. Have a lot of clients who purchased homes at the top of the market and are struggling with high interest rates? Offer a special incentive to refinance so that you can help them.

2. Knowledge of Where Customers Spend Time: Once you’ve gathered a basic background of your customers, it will be easier to figure out what social networks they utilize, where they go for their information and how they delegate their time spent online.

Knowing where customers spend time online will let you know where you should put most of your efforts. If your client base spends the most time on reading emails and never really got hooked on Facebook, you know that your time would be spent putting together email newsletters instead of posting on your wall.

3. Better Quality Leads: So now that you have your personas identified what interests your clients, how they communicate online, and what they need, how is this going to help you? Now that you know how to cater to your customers and where you will be able to reach them, you will be able to get better quality leads resulting in a higher conversion rate. Use this information to change the content in your campaigns whether they be through email marketing or pay per click. When you better understand what your customers want, you will be able to get higher quality leads and in return better customers who will be loyal and spread positive feedback about your company.

4. Consistency Across Your Business: Personas will help you better understand what your different target groups are and be able to identify them without a problem when discussing marketing strategies with your coworkers. When everyone is clear on what group you are talking about, you will have more productive brainstorming sessions and be able to provide a consistent message to each group. This will also help your sales or recruitment team better understand what points to mention when trying to bring new customers on, and how to modify their pitch for each target group without fumbling for words. This will also help them answer questions that may be brought up during a sales pitch. If a salesperson makes the potential customer feel that your company will be there to answer any question they have and that you understand their needs, you will have a better chance of closing the deal.

5. Better Product Development:  If you know what your clients are looking for to begin with, it makes it a lot easier to develop a product that will feed their needs from the start. Personas will help you identify what aspects your business is missing, and how you can better fill the voids that exist. If you build products that will grow and transition right alongside your client, they will stick with you and help your company grow. Use the information you gather for your personas to suggest ideas to the people in charge of development so they can implement it in their design process.

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