Building Personas: Defining Your Audience

To serve your audience well, you have to know them.  That’s why creating personas is a valuable practice for many departments across an organization, whether you work for an association, non-profit, or for-profit B2B or B2C company. Your marketing, membership, sales, product, customer success, education, and other teams can all learn from personas to improve their strategies.

That’s because personas help teams focus on understanding the needs and pain points of their members, customers, and prospects. And that helps organizations deliver more personalized experiences, content, and solutions tailored to meet the needs of specific segments.

To develop effective personas, though, you have to get a data-driven understanding of your environment. This means getting a firm grasp of the makeup of your member or customer base, your website traffic, and your competition.

So let’s explore how to create personas!

The Basics of Personas

Audiences often break down by titles, roles and responsibilities, work environment, and motivations. To identify which personas you will develop, begin by looking at an audience type that is vital to your organizations’ mission and goals and look for commonalities.

For example, when looking at the makup of their membership, a human resources association might decide to have personas for executives in HR, diversity officers, compensation and benefits managers, human resource information specialists, and talent acquisition and recruiting managers.

Make sure to give your persona a name that best describes them and try to assign a picture. While this is not a real person, the goal of personas is to develop a deep understanding of your audience at a human level so that you can customize your brand experience for them.

Harness Your Data

Once you know what personas you want to have, go to your database to see what data you can collect on them, such as gender, age, job title, location, etc. Then take a deeper dive into questions related to what their environment is like, what motivates them, and what their aspirations are.

In addition to your database, you might collect this type of information through surveys, interviews, and focus groups. You can also draw from the other platforms and systems at your disposal, like your online community, job board, LMS, and more.

Ask these simple but effective questions: 

• What’s the age range of most of your members or customers?
• How much do they spend?
• What roles do they perform within their organizations?
• If you sell to companies or other organizations, what industries are most represented?
• What is their yearly revenue?

Another great resource for discovering your audience is web analytics. Understanding how members and customers  navigate your website is invaluable for developing effective, accurate personas.

Look for traffic patterns that suggest your audience’s intentions, needs, interests, and sticking points:

• Who is coming to your site?
• Which pages are most popular?
• How long do they typically visit your website, and how long do they linger on these popular pages?
• What keywords do they use to find your site?
• What content and search terms do they search for on your site?

The data that’s important to you will differ depending on if you’re a B2B, B2C, or member-based organization, but the goal is the same: identify key groups that make up your audience and the data points that help you identify and understand them.

Gather Competitive Intel

Keeping tabs on your competitors, or other organizations operating in the same space as you, is another way to learn more about your audience and build out your personas. You can gain a deeper understanding of what pricing models work; popular topics for programs, benefits, or products; or even ideas of who to target. Though “competitive intel” is a strategy more often used by B2B and B2C companies, associations and non-profits can also use some of these tactics to gain a better understanding of their audience.

Start by searching competitor or similar sites for testimonials, case studies, press releases, or newsletter signups. Set up Google Alerts for new content, and follow their social media accounts for updates, interactions, and events. Conferences can also great place to get a feel for how your competitors or similar organizations position their offerings.

Depending on your industry, services like Guidestar or Zoominfo can help you get an understanding of your competitions’ size and finances.

After your online research is complete, it’s time to get personal. Attend a webinar, call customer support, even request a demo or sign up for the service if you can. Ask customers or members switching from the competition why they are making the change. Even more importantly, conduct thorough exit interviews for those customers or members who choose to leave you for the competition.

Not only will this information help you fill in nuance and detail in your audience personas, but it has the potential to help and improve every department across your organization.

Validate Your Assumptions

So far, you’ve done great research and identified audience demographic data and professional interests. But your assumptions about their needs, drivers, and pain points are, so far, just that – assumptions. A great way to round out your research for your personas is to go straight to the source – your members and customers.

Set up some time to interview a handful of customers or members. Fight the natural urge to go straight to your all-star influencers or most engaged members. It’s critical you get a full spectrum of perspectives.

Ask questions rooted in “How, What, When, Where, Why,” but don’t be afraid to go off-script. Rather than asking about prescriptive solutions or potential features, ask general-purpose, open-ended questions. Inquire about goals, frustrations, processes, limitations; look for examples, and most importantly, always come back to “Why?” Simply asking why will give your customer a platform to provide you with in-depth, unscripted observations.

The real insight will come when you get away from your initial agenda and start listening to the customer’s story.

Bringing Your Personas to Life

The data, which we like to call the “head” portion of your persona, is first, but uncovering the “heart” of your persona is what will really bring it to life. To get to the heart knowledge, you need to understand the needs, expectations, motivations, values, attitudes, and behaviors of your audience.

People donate their time and money, support a cause, or make a purchase, based on how they feel. Discovering what truly matters to your personas will enable you to be intentional in communicating why your organization should matter to them.

Now that you understand what a persona is and how personas can elevate your messaging and drive your organization’s services and offerings, it’s time to gather your stakeholders and develop personas.

Involving Stakeholders Across the Organization

It’s essential, when developing your personas, to involve stakeholders from departments across the organization. This ensures your research is complete and you’re not missing any major groups you serve. It also ensures your entire organization is aligned and focused around agreed on audience segments. With everyone on the same page, your organization’s use of personas will be much more effective.

Example Persona: Ashley Non-Profit

Ashley is an early-career nonprofit marketing professional. She is in her early 20s and has a bachelor’s degree. She is comfortable with technology and regularly uses social media.

Making a difference is important to her, as is growing in her career. She is eager to learn and keep up with ever-evolving marketing best practices, but she has a limited budget. Working at a nonprofit, she finds she needs to wear many hats and learn things on-the-go.

She relies heavily on free or low-cost education and resources. She prefers on-demand learning, which is easier to fit into her schedule. She highly values opportunities to network and learn from her peers.

Sample Persona Development Checklist

Are your members or customers a homogeneous group? If not, there are at least two distinct groups that warrant persona development. Audiences often break down by titles, roles and responsibilities, work environment, and motivations. Begin with an audience type that is vital to your organizations’ mission and goals. As yourself the following questions to help you get started:

• Describe the work environment of your audience (ie: office job, field work, nontraditional hours, night jobs, weekend jobs)?
• What are they entrusted to do?
• What do they need to be successful?
• What do they value?
• Why did they choose this profession and why do they stay?
• What’s the outlook for the future?
• What are their biggest challenges or concerns?
• How is your association/organization important to their lives?
• What do you uniquely provide?
• What emotions/feelings do you want to evoke in your audience?

Putting Personas to Use

Personas are an effective tool to put your audience front and center and keep them in your line of sight. They help you develop better strategies by objectively looking at your organization’s website, imagery, content, and value proposition through the eyes of the persona. With conscious persona development and application, you can dial more deeply into your audience’s needs to drive better engagement,  revenue, and outcomes for your audience and organization.