Personality Crisis: The Importance of Audience Personas

Remember that classic 1979 song by The Knack called “My Persona”?

No? Um … we don’t either.

But while we’re on the topic, let’s talk about buyer/customer personas and how they can help an organization better understand and interact with its target audience. This is, after all, a marketing blog not “American Bandstand.”

An audience persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer and is created through research and data. Your audience is comprised of multidimensional people with personal and professional lives. So, the purpose of personas is to create realistic and relatable user-centered representations of your key audience segments for reference during the branding and storytelling process.

At M3 Group, we use personas to provide insight into your customers’ lives, decision-making processes and media consumption habits. We also use personas to understand how your brand uniquely resolves felt pain and creates gain for different individuals in your target market.

The best personas are based on customer research, including sales and customer-relationship-management data, website analytics, surveys and focus groups, interviews, and secondary research on consumer behavior and preferences. Using these data-based personas as a guide, you can make marketing decisions with confidence that every element, from words to images, will help those in your target audience feel safe to move along their customer journey with you.

For example, if we were to create a persona for a typical M3 Group client, that person would be someone of well-above-average intelligence who is devilishly attractive and clever enough to seek out the most creative and all-encompassing marketing agency in mid-Michigan. C’mon. That simply goes without saying.

Your brand plan serves as the face of your organization. It defines who you are, what you stand for, what you have to offer, and how you intend to be perceived and received. Audience personas are one method to assist in the development of strong, critical messaging that connects quickly with your target audience.

In essence, personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding for the living, breathing humans using your product or service. The process helps avoid assuming when considering the lens through which you view your service and competition. Instead, it helps you see more clearly and focused through the end user’s lens.

Developing personas and creating a multidimensional user experience for multidimensional audiences is key to long-term success. Want to know more about how M3 Group can help you poise your brand for growth and gains by furthering your understanding of your audience through personas? Reach out to us at m3group.biz/contact-us/ or drop us an email at info@m3group.biz. We’re always happy to help.

You could say that we have a “knack” for the research, insight and development that will make you say, “M-m-m-my persona.”

Full circle. See what we did there?

No?

Um … never mind.