HOW TO CREATE A TARGET AUDIENCE PERSONA

Whether you’re developing your marketing plan or even a simple social media post, do you ever feel just… stuck?

Sometimes you don’t know what to write or why you’re even taking the time to do this in the first place. There’s one thing I keep bringing my clients back to when they’re feeling scrambled and trying to think of the next great idea to help their business: The Target Audience Persona. 

Sometimes called avatars, customer personas, or ideal users, target audience personas help give you a roadmap on why you do the things you do. It defines your niche. Who exactly are you selling to? Why are you writing that certain blog post? Why are you adding this tactic to your marketing plan? Why are you developing this giveaway versus another option? It narrows your focus so you can be uber clear on why you’re putting the time and effort into some tactics over others. 

AUDIENCE PERSONA DEFINITION

Content marketing is huge right now in both B2C and B2B realms. To make it work, you’ve got to know who you’re talking to, who you’re creating all this content for, and ultimately, who you’re selling to. You want to define it down to a person and we want to know this person inside and out: we want to know their wants, their needs, their challenges, their struggles, their loves, their hates. You want to know them intimately. 

A target audience persona represents your perfect customer. This one single person is the potential customer who wants and needs your content, product, or services. You also love working with this person as well. They need you, you love working with them. 

PERSONA VS. TARGET AUDIENCE

You might be wondering why we’d be developing this persona for just one person. There are billions of people in this world and lots of them need what you’re selling. So why would you focus your efforts on just creating for one person?

I’m sure you’ve heard the term “target audience” before. You can talk about your target audience in broad terms like when understanding who’s in the audience at your keynote speech or who’s following you on social media but not always engaging. 

But the difference between a target audience as a whole and a persona is the specificity. When talking about a persona, you’re trying to nail down the characteristics of the person you. most want to sell to. It’s impossible to know a whole audience intimately. But if you can pick one person out of that audience that you want to sell to and help define their wants and needs, it helps your decision-making process on how you can fix their problems with your product or service and how to market that. 

So think of a persona as just that. Your ideal customer. A single person that you’d love to sell to over and over again. Someone who values what you have to offer and will pay what it’s worth. 

By putting your efforts toward this one person, you’re not limiting yourself. You’re actually doing the opposite by being laser-focused on what your ideal customer wants and needs. This focus pays off tenfold. You can’t and don’t want to be everything for everyone. 

You will attract a lot of people that fall under the umbrella of your “persona” but don’t worry about it! Let’s just narrow it down to one or two. 

If you’re not clear on who your target audience persona is your message won’t be clear, it’ll be diluted, and it’ll lack relevance. If you try to attract everyone, you’ll attract no one. If you try to have a general avatar, you’ll have an unclear, diluted message.

Look, there’s a lot of noise online. When you’re not laser-focused, you’re more likely to get lost in the sea of voices. When you’re general, your topics can get kind of boring. When you’re laser-focused, you stand out to the people that resonate with you most. 

CREATING AUDIENCE PERSONAS

Have you ever had an experience with a brand that just blew you away? It was almost like the experience, the product, the online class, or even the person was made for you and was exactly what you needed at that point in your life or business. Maybe it was a specific training program to help you with a certification or a business coach to take your company to the next level. It could even have been the perfect pair of jeans that stretched and hugged in all the right places — again like they were made for you. 

Can you remember the last time you found something that was just what you needed? For me, recently, it was a freelance writer I found on LinkedIn (shout out to you, Rachel Cooper!) who showed up right when I needed her most in my business. It was an immediate connection and only a week later, she began supporting me and my clients in much of our SEO writing work.  She was literally the answer to my prayers and was exactly what I needed in my business. 

That’s the feeling we want to get from our audience and why we create these target audience personas. As business owners, we want to create the type of experience for our target audience personas where they say the same thing, “This was exactly what I needed.” Even better? We want them to say, “Do you read minds or something? Because this is what I needed at this very moment!”

For this to happen, we need to intimately understand our target audience persona. Their fears, their aspirations, what keeps them up at night, what they’re thinking, and what they’re needing. Today’s blog post is all about finding your target audience persona so you can build, market, and sell exactly what they need and when they need it. 

HOW TO BUILD AUDIENCE PERSONAS

You might be wondering, how am I supposed to know exactly what my target audience persona really wants? I hear this question a lot. You must put yourself in their shoes. When you do this, you’ll understand what they like, what they don’t like, what their aspirations are, and most importantly, what their fears are. 

Once you figure this out (and get a little creative with it!) you’ll realize that your products or services are a solution to their needs and wants. And they’ll pay for it because you know how to get the results or the transformation they’re looking for. 

But how do you put yourself in their shoes? It’s actually simpler than you think.  First, connect and listen to them. 

First, write a detailed description of your target audience persona. Dive deep. You’re most likely going to be making this person up (I know, sounds kind of strange). OR you might already have a raving customer that is your target audience persona. 

To write about them, first, you need to give them a name. Yes! Even if this person is made up, you need to give them a name and a face (even if you find it off Google).