Personas in Marketing

October 17, 2024

Bibadash/Shutterstock.com

How can my brand leverage personas for more effective, targeted marketing?

Developing and establishing personas to help segment and personalize creative messaging and content is one of the most integral ways for marketers to reach the right audience at the right time. Crafting personas that resonate and connect with your intended demographic(s) can make all the difference between someone remembering your brand and possibly becoming a loyal customer, and someone who doesn't take a second glance.

In a time where there are endless ways to reach consumers in a complicated marketplace, creating buyer personas can help ease some of the challenges. This can be done through conducting research and/or garnering demographic information, as well as taking the time to understand the pain points and needs of different groups. When a marketer can understand when and why a consumer needs or wants a product or service (such as a new car owner needing to find insurance or a new parent looking for baby clothes), then media and financial waste is decreased.

Esther-Mireya Tejeda, former CMO at Anywhere Real Estate, stressed the importance of understanding consumers holistically, explaining at an ANA event that defining these needs and personas helps predict future behaviors, stating, "When you get to that kind of understanding of your customer and you can see the areas of overlap and the cohorts within your customer segment that align around emographic profiles, you can extrapolate into the future what those behaviors will be. It's very good at predicting future customer behaviors because you understand intrinsically who they are."

Below are helpful best practices and examples.

Best Practices and Trends

How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [+Free Persona Template]. HubSpot, August 2024.
Marketers know that marketing according to data points alone isn't enough to get meaningful engagement: that's the job of a buyer persona. While demographic survey results are great, many factors of customer behavior are needed to create a well-rounded and detailed buyer persona. This piece explains what a buyer persona is and shows you how to combine different research methods to form and create detailed buyer personas. In just a few thoughtful steps, you'll walk away with consumer stories and profiles representing your customer base. You can download HubSpot's Persona Guide here and Templates here.
Examples of Personas for Different Industries. ANA, August 2023.
Marketers use personas to guide their efforts at segmentation and tailored messaging. By way of illustration, Willow Data Strategy offers numerous examples of the kinds of personas that might be used in hospitality, gift, B2B, telecommunications, and financial industries.
Emography: The Next Frontier of Customer Persona Building. ANA, April 2024.
Esther-Mireya Tejeda, a transformation leader and former CMO at Anywhere Real Estate, discussed a concept she pioneered called "emography" and provided a brand-focused example of how the philosophy might be put into practice.
Free Customer Profile Templates with a How-To Guide. Smartsheet, July 2023.
Boost your marketing and sales efforts with these free customer profile templates. Each downloadable, editable template is available in multiple formats, including Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and more. Included on this page, you'll find a B2B ideal customer profile template, a customer profile scorecard template, a customer profile presentation template, and more. Plus, find guidance on how to create a customer profile template. For example:
How To Create an Ideal Customer Persona. YouGov, May 2023.
Customer personas help to tailor your marketing, delivering a personalized customer experience. Looking to create a customer persona to understand exactly who you're marketing to, and boost marketing ROI? Use this handy guide to get to know your customers on a deeper level. Here's a summary of what you'll find in this guide to persona marketing:

What is an ideal customer persona?
Eight key steps to create a persona.
Creating a customer persona template.
Customer persona example.
Persona case studies and success stories.
How to use personas to improve marketing performance.
What are ideal customer personas to improve marketing performance?

Premium, Defined: Long-Form Content Drives Ad Success. ANA, September 2024.
DIRECTV identifies five valuable personas that can be appealed to with premium long-form video. The information on each persona includes its demographic breakdown and its viewing and purchasing behavior.

How To Build a Better Audience Persona (Choose a Detailed or Quick Method). Content Marketing Institute, October 2022.
Good marketers know how to sell a brand. But to be a great marketer, you must know the people you're trying to sell it to. Creating (and documenting) clear, robust marketing personas is an effective and time-tested approach to reaching that goal.

Personas are filled with critical audience insights. They are developed through detailed customer research, direct conversations, and thoughtful analysis of relevant trends and opportunities. They reflect your customers' genuine interests and intentions, which fuel resonant, relatable brand stories. They help creative teams convey the voice of the customer. Without personas you can only assume what content your audience wants. That can lead to content on topics your brand knows best (your products and company) but little focus on what the audience wants to know.

This guide collects expert advice to help you prepare, build, and apply personas efficiently while making them as effective as possible.

Examples

Payoneer Takes a Persona-Based-Approach to Drive Uplift Among Decision Makers. ANA, September 2023.
Payoneer is a fintech business offering a global payment platform to small-to-medium sized businesses (SMB). The platform covers more countries than any other provider and makes transactions easy. Payoneer also covers markets that other providers avoid because they are too difficult.

The task: to raise brand awareness in some very challenging international markets, drive new business registrations, and drive a 100 percent uplift in monthly lead volumes. Additional campaign KPIs included a 15 percent uplift in new registrations. Payoneer created a persona-based platform to meet the unique needs of its different audiences, helping the brand achieve a 27 percent uplift in incremental registrations.

Tools

Buyer Persona Template. ANA/Demand Metric, January 2024.
If you need a precise understanding of buyer behavior and characteristics, yse this template to create buyer personas for the key buyers that you intend to target.

See also:

The Marketing Knowledge Center actively connects ANA members to the resources they need to be successful. You can visit the ANA website to engage with the MKC in three ways.

Explore content to access best practices, case studies, and marketing tools. Our proprietary content includes Event Recaps, which share actionable insights from conference and committee presentations.
Connect with our ASK Research Service in real time for customized answers to your specific marketing challenges.
Stay on top of trends with Pulse issues, which explore how new technologies and innovations will affect marketers and consumers alike.