Steps to Creating an Audience Persona

Audience persona refers to the creation of a person that will represent a group of people. Consequently, building audience personas has proven to be rewarding because it gives you a better opportunity of fulfilling the needs of you customers through targeted content.

So how then do you create an audience persona?

Steps to Creating an Audience Persona

Here are five easy steps to creating an audience persona:

1. Create a Vision Board
   
   Creating a vision board is a perfect way of conceptualizing an idea. The vision board is usually comprised of a collection of words or photos that are cut from old newspapers of magazines. Creation of a vision board is best left for the marketing team as this goes a long way in ensuring that everyone is on board with the results.
2. Define Your Target AudienceThe old-style content marketing segmentation relied on demographic information like age, income and location. However, today marketers need to go a little further and ask questions that reveal a little more about their target audience. Therefore, you need to compile a list of questions that you will ask yourself about your target audience in a bid to know them on a deeper level. These may include the following:

• What is their occupation?
• What are their major pain points?
• Who are they in their buyer journey and what decision-making authority do they have?
• Who or where do they look for trusted information online?
• What is their key motivation to purchase a product?

The answers to these questions usually bring you a step closer to knowing the true identity of your audience.

1. Give the Persona a Name
   Having a fictitious character without a name is not sensible.  Therefore, you need to give your persona a name. While at it, ensure that it is a real name so that the persona also feels like a real person. You may then include a major characteristic that best defines your persona. This may be based on a favorite hobby or job role, for instance, George the football fanatic. Identifying the persona’s job, role and company is a plus especially when it comes to customer surveys. Thus, you can include a field for the company size and job title, as well as type of business.
2. Select a Photo
   Your persona needs to have a photo. In the game ‘Guess who?’ you would secretly select one person from a board that has numerous illustrated characters. The onus of guessing the probable character that you chose would then lie with your opponent by asking a string of questions. This idea applies with the audience persona. That is, it is important to define the age, ethnicity, gender as well as other defining physical attributes. Once you have these attributes together, you will then have to choose a photo that resonates with these physical attributes. Understanding the attributes serves as a guide to helping your team come up with the right photo of models that relate to the audience.
3. Repeat the Process for Secondary and Tertiary Target Audience
   If you are targeting more than one audience, then you must define a persona for each of them. You will also do well to have an editorial calendar that has the audience persona column. This usually serves as a quick visual for the team to readily see the content that is being created for the audience. In addition, writers will also be able to draw a connection between the content they create and the people they are writing for.

Audience persona creation needs to involve the entire team (marketing, business development, customer service, etc.). Generally, audience persona creation should involve anyone on the team that interacts with customers or customer data because they get to share different perspectives on what makes the customers tick. When you have your personas in place, you can then reach out to them with specific messages with your content. Ultimately, the outcome of your audience persona creation should be an enhanced experience for your customer!