In the business world, marketing is the primary key in supporting the establishment of a business. Therefore, business owners always work hard in order to create countless marketing strategies to grow their business. Of course there are other essential components that complement successful marketing strategies, such as building a website, creating advertisements, making high quality content marketing strategies, etc. However, some business owners tend to forget one influential part in content marketing; target market personas. In the business field, we cannot only think about how our market will grow, but we should also think about what our target market needs based on their persona. Through establishing their personas, we can introduce our company’s values to them in a better way. If you are a business owner, we hope this article can help answer your questions regarding content marketing.

When you try to reach to your target audience, it is possible that you may have “crossed paths” with the wrong processes that may have led you to believe that you know and understand your potential customers while you actually didn’t, because in order for you to know and understand your target audience, you have to analyse their personas to help you create new ideas to adjust to their personas. In this article, we provide you with several tips on how to construct your target audience’s personas.

First of all, what are buyer’s personas?

Personas are characters you design according to your research in order to represent different types of your target market that might use your products, services, website, brand or anything your company offers. Through creating personas, you will be able to understand your target audience’s needs, goals, experiences, personalities, etc. When you finish creating personas, you can then know what you need to do and know the steps to take in order to fulfil those. When you know what to do, it will be easier for your target audience to find you. Below are the steps you should take when constructing your buyer’s personas.

Find your target

The first step before anything is to find your target. Envision your ideal customers that may be perfect for your products or services and then collect the data. You can start by making a character sketch that can be used as references. These components can help in describing the character sketch:

• Who is this person? What demographic characteristics describe her/him best?
• What does she/he do for a living?
• What are the most common experiences she/he has had?
• What does she/he have and what doesn’t she/he have?
• What kind of goals does she/he have?
• What are the obstacles that may hinder her/his goals?
• What does she/he need in order to overcome and solve her/his specific problems or obstacles?

After that, collect all the data you need to answer about the characters and from there, you can go to the next step. Remember, you can make more than one characters (and you should!)

Create hypothesis

Based on the data you have collected, you can then form a hypothesis that can support the data and answer those questions according to your general ideas. You can make several suppositions, such as what kind of work the character does, what role she/he plays in her/his working place, what influences her/him to make decisions, what she/he likes to purchase in everyday life, etc.

Verify your hypothesis

This step is where you confirm all of your assumptions and estimations whether they are true or false. This will let you know if you start off on the right foot or not. The goal in this step is whether you should accept or reject your hypothesis; therefore, it is important to know the differences between the characters you make. You can do this by confronting and comparing project participants that are in your hypothesis to your existing knowledge.

Describe and construct the personas    

After making verifications, you can work on the descriptions of the personas you have created. Describe them in general, starting from their educations, lifestyles, patterns of behaviours, interests, values, needs, desires, goals, attitudes, even to challenges. You can make 1-2 pages of descriptions of each persona. Don’t forget to name each persona, you will need that for comparisons.

Define situations and create scenarios

Of course after constructing your buyer personas, you can place them into different situations and create scenarios that can support the data you have collected. This can help you get some insights on what will happen in the future and how you will manage it, and if there are problems that might happen too, you can construct plans to tackle the hassle.

Observe the ongoing development and create future-proof solutions

The scenarios you have created can be applied in the real life based on the personas’ descriptions, but you should always change them as time goes by, because with time, everything will also change and in the business world, you cannot stay out-dated, right? You should also go with time and follow up with the trends. It is important for you to create solutions in advance that can help solve future problems by observing the ongoing development, because basically, you can see future problems based on the current problems. That way, you can manage any situation that may come in the future.

That’s how you create your target audience personas! In order to provide the right products or services and promote your brand in the right way, it is important for you to know and understand your target audience personas. If you understand them better, you can provide exactly what they need and they can find you easily. When you promote your brand without the basic knowledge on your future buyer’s personas, your future buyers will not understand your brand too. Think before you create, create before you plan, and plan before you sell. With that in mind, you can make better and even top-notch content marketing strategies that will make your business successful and well-managed.