Persona Development: Personas Need To Tell You “Why” in Addition To “Who”

The goal, when you’re creating a marketing plan, is to put together something that will appeal to your customers and clients. That’s why a company gathers data about sales, trends, and all the surveys from the pool of its potential customer base. However, that mountain of data can be difficult to wrap your head around. That’s why lots of companies, instead of dealing with an Everest of raw information, will use the data to create marketing personas.

What Are Marketing Personas?

A marketing persona is an amalgamation of data that companies can use to create a stand-in for their potential customers. So, while Sara the single mom who works as a nurse and drives a Subaru might not be a real person, she is built out of the bricks of customer research data. By putting a face, and a story, to the data, it becomes easier to digest. Once it’s been molded into a shape that can be understood, it becomes a lot easier to create marketing campaigns targeted at this fake person.

The Problem With Many Marketing Personas – They Don’t Explain Anything!

The difficulty, of course, is that there’s a huge difference between a marketing persona, and a good marketing persona. While it’s relatively easy to take the trends seen in customer data, and create a story that fits them, the accuracy of that story can vary wildly. That’s because it isn’t enough to just create a persona that fits the facts; the persona has to, at least partially, explain those facts.

Personas have to tell you who your customers are, but they also have to explain what motivates them. Motivation, and what drives customer actions, is key to a marketing campaign that delivers. It’s also key to a persona that isn’t just a stack of numbers with a smiley face drawn on it.

Put simply, if a persona doesn’t tell you who your customers are, what they want, and what drives their actions, then it’s going to be useless to your efforts to try to improve your company’s marketing efforts. That is, quite frankly, why company’s are growing tired of gibberish personas which don’t bring them any closer to growing their audience.

For more information on persona generation, and the questions good marketing personas need to answer, simply contact us today!