What Is a Marketing Persona?

What Is a Persona in Marketing?

In literary terms, a persona is a role assumed by the author, enabling them to tell their story using a first-person narrative. A marketing persona is a fictional character created by a marketer to represent a certain demographic in their target audience.

What about a buyer persona in marketing? Well, it’s the same thing. This persona is someone you are selling to, so they are your potential buyer. In account-based marketing, marketers work closely with sales teams to create tailored campaigns for high-value clients. Buyer personas are a key element here, steering the creative direction of these campaigns.

As the name suggests, an anti-persona is someone who isn’t part of your target market. When creating your actual personas, it’s good to identify anti-personas to ensure you don’t direct your campaigns towards people who won’t be interested in your product.

Why use marketing personas?

Creating marketing personas helps marketing teams to get inside their users’ minds and figure out what they want in a product or service. This information could be relayed back to the product team so that customer-focused enhancements can be made.

Personas also enable marketers to personalize the message they deliver to specific demographics. Marketing teams can use a targeted approach to break their audience into segments and discover which ones are most likely to engage with their content. For example, rather than sending a generic, broad-reaching email to all users, you could create a unique greeting for each segment based on demographic information.

Finally, personas help marketing teams to identify strong leads. By creating a personalized message for a fictional character, they might attract a real-life person who fits this description. This lead might respond to the marketing efforts by visiting the organization’s website or signing up for a free trial, which could result in them becoming a long-time customer.

Marketing persona example

Let’s say you work for a toy company. This means your campaigns will target people who frequently buy toys for kids. You could create a number of customer personas that fit this description. Your potential customers can be full-time parents, grandparents, and other family members.

Here's an example persona for your campaign.

Name: Jane
Age: 28
Occupation: Mother
Marital status: Married
Location: Nashville, Tennessee
Kids: Sarah (4) and Jason (2)
Social media used: Instagram
Goals: To purchase toys with educational value
Pain points: Excessive use of plastic

Based on the above information, a marketing team could create a campaign that speaks to Jane directly. For example, it might include an Instagram video ad that shows two young kids playing a counting game made from wooden blocks.

Now you know what a marketing persona looks like, you can create one tailored to your specific audience. By using ideal customer personas, you can boost your marketing strategies and reach beyond your existing customers.