How to create a target client persona

Why should you create personas?

Every business has the task of figuring out who would be best suited to their product. Aiming at the masses is one of the hardest ways to differentiate your business. Your clients should be able to spot your products easily and associate with your brands values and attributes. Brands need a focus, this allows it to become a go-to item for a specific type of person. Your target audience, will be like-minded individuals who hold similar core values to your brands. With this new found client descriptor you can approach ad creatives and imaging specialists with specific personalities to create for. Making images for Bob the excavator who loves MMA and local craft beer will  be a lot different than Jenn the accountant who loves bird photography and scotch. This information allows for you to craft your story more easily, and takes some of the guess work out of decisions.

To start, let’s get an initial buyer persona figured out using the data you currently have.

Start with your existing client-base.

Building your initial persona can be hard, we often find clients at this point in their businesses, this is where we highly suggest looking into their current client base. Creating personas is as simple as that, but you’ll need some core information to get those people fleshed out and ready for your creatives to be able to use these personalities to shape your outbound media.

Step 1 Create 3 distinct personalities.

Your first step is to outline the broad descriptions of the clients. As we mentioned before, using a current client who is purchasing your products / services is a great place to start. Give them all names, we’ve found often doing a quick google image search and finding 3 different headshots really can help. From here we can now apply some common attributes to each specific personality.

For example:

• John the editor, 48 M / lives in a small town, loves hiking, spending time at the harbor with his family at the restaurant, often uses the local pool to train for his upcoming triathlon.
• Jill the product specialist, 25 F / lives in a large city, tries to get some time to hit the gym, but prefers to sit in on her friends yoga and wine nights, her favourite pastime is ice hockey.
• Frank the construction company manager, 39 M lives in rural setting, gets on the lake from the moment it thaws to freezes, is a big fan of Friday night Karaoke and is determined to become a professional wrestler.

Step 2 Get your sales & marketing staff to help create backstory.

You can get really specific here, the more information that’s available just refines the target client. What do they listen to, how do they spend their time etc. The goal in any B2B or B2P business is to determine as many factors possible to allow you to make a persona character.  Your sales & marketing representatives will have a solid concept of who’s your market. They’ll look at your created characters and help flesh out the main backstory using the data that they have accumulated over time while dealing with the current client-base. If you’re just starting up, try to envision your potential clients, you’ll be able to use the metrics to tell you if you’re on the right track.

Step 3 Measure the engagement & use metrics to refine your buyer personas.

This is where the fun begins. Using the new buyer personas you can now have a confident look into your creative work. Monitor the ad sets going out into your marketing streams and keep track of which personas are reacting well to which ads. You’ll be able to really start to get a hold on what your target audience loves. You may find that your ad set designed with a specific persona in mind has started to really attract a second and tertiary persona set, those you can in turn create additional personas, to help comprehend how you can serve them better, or at least modify the current to allow for the variances. You may determine that your target audience is actually a persona you didn’t give much credence to, this opens up a potential for increasing your marketing strategies with that persona in mind, this can lead to finding a great market for your brand. By tracking the ads and their creatives you can really find out what appeals to your clients.

Personas are a handy tool to approach your creative vendors with, a commercial lifestyle photographer will photograph in a different light depending on your audience, a persona that loves dark and moody music, stout beer and horror films is probably going to react better to your dramatic portrait ad set over the warm cozy fireside set you have. Knowing the audience allows for your ad creatives and call to actions to be more focused. When we approach shoots with this kind of information we can really keep those personas in mind whilst on set.

To summarize!

In closing creating buyer personas is part of helping your brand develop into a successful venture. Knowing who you’re marketing to is a really great way to refine your delivery of your product and services to similar people to your current client base. We love the whole process of building brands, and we’ve been wanting to share what’s working for us recently here at AMP. Below are 3 examples of people we love working with, these are personas that we use in AMP, hopefully it’ll give you some insight into how to help your brand grow!

Courtney:

37 F, loves the process of creating unique story driven marketing campaigns. Courtney works as a project manager in a small business, her main focus is driving home the companies brand, she does this through strategic advertising and consistent social media posts.

Her favourite hobbies are swimming, spending time with her family at various local foodie hotspots and runs her own style blog in her spare time.

She’s objective and open to new ways of thinking. Cautiously approaching problems, with an emphasis on creativity has made her able to think outside the box while helping others to see her unique approach. Her sense of humour & friendly nature is prevalent in her work.

Travis:

45 M, runs his own construction business, has a very clear vision of how he wants to shake up the local business and wants to create a luxury high-end construction business.

He loves food & beer, his family and vintage cars. He does attend the gym occasionally, but finds it hard as he’s often busy with work.

Calm and collected with an eye for social media, he’s often trying new ways of sharing his stories, he can often be found tinkering with a recent social  media trends & apps. His youthful approach to life makes him an entertaining person to be around.

Evette:

29 F, Big dreams and an insatiable love for all medias. She’s created a niche for herself as a freelance designer, and now works with a young and upcoming design agency.

She loves her hiking and often uses her travels to create simple nature images, displaying her awareness for patterns in the wild. She’s an avid Ju Jitsu athlete and thrives on the local markets.

Effervescent and driven,  she is often viewed as a thought leader in the design world. She has a light-hearted approach to issues that make projects flow with a good rhythm. She lives life with a firm belief of karma.