How to Use Audience Personas
Author: Heather Stephens
One of my favorite marketing strategy sessions to facilitate is the audience one. I love to figure out who we are already reaching, who we want to reach, and who influences them. I’ve heard that audience personas, a tool that helps you define and understand your audience, are a thing of the past, but I still find great value in them. For me, the audience persona and the conversation around them is one of the quickest ways for me to understand a company, their audience, and what their marketing strategy should be. Knowing an audience, really knowing them, can help you determine where to spend your time and money and can help minimize missteps in communication and marketing.
Why Bother With an Audience Session?
A lot of companies believe that they already have their customers figured out. There is something about the audience strategy session, though, that always brings out a little more information even for companies who bring in a lot of data they’ve collected. Often, a few thoughtful questions and an outside perspective can help a company discover something about their audience they didn’t know or had wrongly assumed. Even if you only spend a couple of hours a year talking about your audience in a deep way, you can still get a lot of the session.
Who Should Attend?
Leadership? Sure. Sales team? Of course. The janitor? Maybe, given the right circumstances. I recommend that you keep the team size fairly small, but that you include a variety of people that can give you different views of the same customer.
One of the most important people to include in your session is the person who answers the phone or your technical support person? Why? They probably spend more time with your customer than most of your team and will have fewer assumptions. They will also know the pain points each customer suffers and what barriers keep them from making a decision. That is valuable information to have because you can design a whole marketing strategy around fixing and avoiding those pitfalls.
But, can the janitor really contribute to an audience session? Yes! An observant janitor may be privy to details that a customer hides in front of the salesperson. They may also represent the audience that a company wants to know and could help leadership understand the motivations for why they would buy a product or a hire the company for services. In retail, the person in charge of cleaning up things left in the wrong place, knows the hottest places to leave stuff and what tends to get left the most.
Where to Start?
The first question that I ask tends to be the hardest one even though it is a very simple one: What name do you want to use for this persona? The reason that this question is hard is because it forces you to narrow down who you are talking about.
I always tell clients to think about a customer that they already have or one they would really love to have. The persona oftentimes gets that person’s name or a name that makes them think about a certain type of person. For example, I worked with a group recently that described a person who would be highly intelligent and socially awkward. As we talked about the characteristics of that person, one person spoke up and said, “Do you know Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory tv show?” That was exactly who their customer was and from that point on, that audience persona became known as Sheldon Cooper.
After you’ve struggled past the name, start with some easy questions. How old is the audience member and is that significant? What is their gender? What are their income or education levels? Where do they live and what opportunities or barriers does that create? These are the “demographic” questions for a persona. They are important because they can help you choose the right advertising mediums and messaging.
What Else Should You Ask?
There are two questions that I always ask in a session. Why would (not should) they choose you? What keeps them from choosing you? Inevitably, I get the smooth sales answers to these questions. They choose us because we are just that great. This is where it becomes extremely helpful to have different voices and outside perspectives in the conversation. There are a lot of assumptions that you can (and will) make about your customers. I write everything down in these sessions, but I know to dig a little deeper. If you say that a customer chooses you because of your sales team, I may turn to the front desk clerk and ask them how many customers request a specific salesperson when they come in. A company that is known for its sales team will get referrals from their happy customers and those people will ask for a specific salesperson.
To me, the question about a customer’s barriers is one of the most interesting and useful questions I ask. A customer can love your product and really want it, but a barrier will keep them from purchasing it unless you can get them around it. Knowing what it is going to stall or stop a sale can help place content or moments in the buying process that address the barriers and help customers move around them.
What Should You Do with the Personas?
Once you have a few audience personas worked out, take a little more time to check your answers. This is where I go back to the assumptions we have made in some of the answers and check them. Customer surveys, talking personally with customers you have good relationships with, speaking with others on your team, and some research will strengthen your personas and your understanding of each of your audiences.
For us, we use these audience personas to determine what media outlets to reach out to, what social influencers are the best fit for each audience, and what content needs to be created. We use the information to determine schedules of when content will be delivered, how it will be delivered, and what will be delivered. Audience personas help us think like customers and even the people who might influence them. That gives us a better way to create the two-way marketing conversations that are so important these days.
Want to Know Your Audience Better?
If you are not sure where to start with your audience personas or want help facilitating an audience strategy session, we can help. We offer strategy services to develop audience personas, as well as a full range of public relations and marketing services to help put those audience personas to work. For more information, contact us to set a time to start talking about who you want to reach.
One of my favorite marketing strategy sessions to facilitate is the audience one. I love to figure out who we are already reaching, who we want to reach, and who influences them. I’ve heard that audience personas, a tool that helps you define and understand your audience, are a thing of the past, but I still find great value in them. For me, the audience persona and the conversation around them is one of the quickest ways for me to understand a company, their audience, and what their marketing strategy should be. Knowing an audience, really knowing them, can help you determine where to spend your time and money and can help minimize missteps in communication and marketing.
Why Bother With an Audience Session?
A lot of companies believe that they already have their customers figured out. There is something about the audience strategy session, though, that always brings out a little more information even for companies who bring in a lot of data they’ve collected. Often, a few thoughtful questions and an outside perspective can help a company discover something about their audience they didn’t know or had wrongly assumed. Even if you only spend a couple of hours a year talking about your audience in a deep way, you can still get a lot of the session.
Who Should Attend?
Leadership? Sure. Sales team? Of course. The janitor? Maybe, given the right circumstances. I recommend that you keep the team size fairly small, but that you include a variety of people that can give you different views of the same customer.
One of the most important people to include in your session is the person who answers the phone or your technical support person? Why? They probably spend more time with your customer than most of your team and will have fewer assumptions. They will also know the pain points each customer suffers and what barriers keep them from making a decision. That is valuable information to have because you can design a whole marketing strategy around fixing and avoiding those pitfalls.
But, can the janitor really contribute to an audience session? Yes! An observant janitor may be privy to details that a customer hides in front of the salesperson. They may also represent the audience that a company wants to know and could help leadership understand the motivations for why they would buy a product or a hire the company for services. In retail, the person in charge of cleaning up things left in the wrong place, knows the hottest places to leave stuff and what tends to get left the most.
Where to Start?
The first question that I ask tends to be the hardest one even though it is a very simple one: What name do you want to use for this persona? The reason that this question is hard is because it forces you to narrow down who you are talking about.
I always tell clients to think about a customer that they already have or one they would really love to have. The persona oftentimes gets that person’s name or a name that makes them think about a certain type of person. For example, I worked with a group recently that described a person who would be highly intelligent and socially awkward. As we talked about the characteristics of that person, one person spoke up and said, “Do you know Sheldon Cooper from the Big Bang Theory tv show?” That was exactly who their customer was and from that point on, that audience persona became known as Sheldon Cooper.
After you’ve struggled past the name, start with some easy questions. How old is the audience member and is that significant? What is their gender? What are their income or education levels? Where do they live and what opportunities or barriers does that create? These are the “demographic” questions for a persona. They are important because they can help you choose the right advertising mediums and messaging.
What Else Should You Ask?
There are two questions that I always ask in a session. Why would (not should) they choose you? What keeps them from choosing you? Inevitably, I get the smooth sales answers to these questions. They choose us because we are just that great. This is where it becomes extremely helpful to have different voices and outside perspectives in the conversation. There are a lot of assumptions that you can (and will) make about your customers. I write everything down in these sessions, but I know to dig a little deeper. If you say that a customer chooses you because of your sales team, I may turn to the front desk clerk and ask them how many customers request a specific salesperson when they come in. A company that is known for its sales team will get referrals from their happy customers and those people will ask for a specific salesperson.
To me, the question about a customer’s barriers is one of the most interesting and useful questions I ask. A customer can love your product and really want it, but a barrier will keep them from purchasing it unless you can get them around it. Knowing what it is going to stall or stop a sale can help place content or moments in the buying process that address the barriers and help customers move around them.
What Should You Do with the Personas?
Once you have a few audience personas worked out, take a little more time to check your answers. This is where I go back to the assumptions we have made in some of the answers and check them. Customer surveys, talking personally with customers you have good relationships with, speaking with others on your team, and some research will strengthen your personas and your understanding of each of your audiences.
For us, we use these audience personas to determine what media outlets to reach out to, what social influencers are the best fit for each audience, and what content needs to be created. We use the information to determine schedules of when content will be delivered, how it will be delivered, and what will be delivered. Audience personas help us think like customers and even the people who might influence them. That gives us a better way to create the two-way marketing conversations that are so important these days.
Want to Know Your Audience Better?
If you are not sure where to start with your audience personas or want help facilitating an audience strategy session, we can help. We offer strategy services to develop audience personas, as well as a full range of public relations and marketing services to help put those audience personas to work. For more information, contact us to set a time to start talking about who you want to reach.