Personas - Importance to Marketing

At Agile, we've been collaborating with clients on creating personas for several years.

What is a Persona? 

It's a fictional representation of an actual customer.  Some definitions say "ideal customer" such as this one from Sam Kusinitz. @sdkusin . "A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers."

Typically, a business will have several personas vs. a single persona. For example, an accounting firm that serves venture-backed businesses will have both male and female CEO's as personas and variations that eventually look like, "Ivan Inventor" - Male, age 25 to 35, single, etc." 

If you're running a startup or a young company, you may not have enough real data collected in which case we favor personas that represent the prospect that are closest to existing and desired customers.

With one of our earlier clients, a parts distribution company we jointly created several personas that helped this business and its sales team. The persona's represented the actual customers served. In this way, existing and new sales representatives had clear details on the ideal customer. Details include job title, interests, places people go on the Internet to do their research, hobbies, marital status, industry experience and more. 

This gets at the heart of this important, we would say critical exercise. We were heartened when we became a HubSpot Partner agency because personas are at the core of the inbound methodology and the HubSpot CRM incorporates personas. Additionally, personas can be used every time you add a contact to the HubSpot CRM.

We recommend that you research CRMs carefully - ensure that the CRM you use or are considering contains a personas module. 

What is A Buyer Persona and how do I create them?

"A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better." HubSpot, Jul 18, 2018

Use the free tool from HubSpot to create your first persona.

How Personas Are Helpful to Social Media

According to socialmediatoday.com, Marketing can use buyer personas to build effective strategies. When creating content marketing strategies, for instance, personas are critical. They help to focus keyword research efforts and are used as reference when crafting copy.  Buyer personas can also help your sales team build rapport with potential customers.