Ultimate Guide: Crafting Audience Personas for Maximum Engagement

We all know that running an online business isn’t easy. Some people grow their businesses with a clear strategy, while others grow organically without a plan. Regardless of how a business grows, one important thing for every business owner is to identify their target audience (Personas).

To develop your business, you might ask yourself or your team questions like, How do buyers get interested in my product? Who is interested in my product or content? How can I communicate with them? These are common questions that every business owner asks.

To answer these questions, you need to understand two marketing concepts: segmentation and personalization. Segmentation is the division of the audience into groups with various characteristics, while personalization is the customization of your marketing content to individuals or groups.

These two concepts can help you understand who your audience is, how they think and feel, what problems they face, and how they want to solve them. This research is called audience persona, which you can use as a marketing strategy.

What is an Audience Persona?

An audience persona is a fictional or ideal representation of a group of audiences that will be the target of your future business marketing strategy. In other words, you can recognize the type of audience and adjust your business concept to better achieve your marketing goals.

This is crucial because you and your team cannot possibly understand or know every individual, especially all aspects of them. However, an audience persona can be a solution, summarizing broadly all the individuals who have ever purchased your product. This way, you only need to create one or three marketing messages, for instance, three digital contents whose messages can resonate emotionally with all audiences.

Here are some elements that typically appear in audience persona research:

• Demographic Information: Age, gender, geographic location, education level, and job status.
• User Goals: What are the audience’s goals in using your product or service.
• Pain Points: Identify the audience’s problems and whether your product or service can solve them.
• Behavior: Recognize how the audience interacts with your business, such as through social media, websites, and email.

By understanding these elements, you can develop a more targeted marketing strategy that is relevant to the needs of your audience. Remember, an audience persona is not an individual depiction but a combination of elements from all audiences.

How to Build an Audience Persona

There are a few steps you need to take to build an audience persona, which are as follows:

1. Research Your Audience

Like any research, conducting audience research involves several methods, such as:

Conduct Surveys: To conduct surveys, you can send them via email, create a special attachment on your website, or even use Instagram Stories. Keep the questions short and simple to avoid boring your audience. Ideally, completing the survey should take no more than two or three minutes, certainly not more than five minutes.

The goal of these surveys is to gather and understand demographic information, common issues, and reasons for purchasing products. When the team plans a digital marketing strategy, they will already have a general idea of the audience’s character and can tailor their content accordingly. For example, if you market through Instagram, your content will become relevant to the users’ needs.

Conduct User Interviews: Interviewing users directly is more effective than using a survey link. For instance, you can contact customers via email or phone. This method allows you to get to know your audience more deeply. Below are some example questions for interviews:

• Where are you calling from?
• What is your family status?
• What is your employment status?
• How did you first hear about me or my company?
• Why did you subscribe to my newsletter or sign up for my course?
• What is your biggest challenge right now?
• What is your biggest goal?
• How do you expect my content to help you achieve your goals?

By doing this, the audience can be more open about their reasons for using or buying your products and services. This data can one day inform the creation of a new product. Additionally, as a token of appreciation for participating in the interview, offer them shopping discount coupons or similar gifts.

2. View Your Analytics Data

Step Two, utilize data analytics: Use the analytics tools available on your platform. For example, Google Analytics for websites or the analytics provided by social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook.

Website and social media analytics can track user interactions, show which pages generate the best conversions, and highlight the ten most viewed or read pages.

3. Identifying Customer Pain Points and Goals

After conducting surveys, the data shows that users have their own issues and goals. You can also identify these problems and help solve them. Solutions can involve your products or services relevant to their situations. Here’s an example:

• Sebastian: Student
• Age: 22 years
• Occupation: Communication Studies student
• Background: Actively involved in organizations and loves interacting with people
• Goal: Become a positive influencer and work at a major company after graduating
• Pain Points: Finding the right platform to express his ideas, limited practical experience in the media industry, and wanting to build a strong personal brand

Having such user data is very beneficial for the company in the future. Besides understanding them, you and your team will not be confused when making plans, because you already know their problems and goals and how to help them. Here, the approach to communication, products, or services offered becomes more appropriate and relevant.

The plans you can create are very diverse, depending on which media platforms you use. For example, content you can share on YouTube, Instagram, Blogs, WordPress, Email Newsletters, and others. The content can be in the form of videos, images, and writings.

4. Find the Pattern

All the collected information will reveal some important patterns or trends about your audience. By understanding these patterns, your decisions and insights will be much better than before. Although this process takes a long time, its usefulness and benefits are significant. Here’s how to analyze patterns in data:

Referral Channels: Identify how users find your products and services. This could be through search engines, social media, personal recommendations, or direct links.

Age Demographics: This helps you understand the interaction differences within different age groups and which age groups are more interested in your products or services.

Geographic Location: Knowing audience data based on location is also important. For example, certain products and services may be very popular in specific areas, or there might be differences in how audiences from different areas interact with your website or social media.

Details:

Popular Natural Cosmetics in Bali and Yogyakarta Research shows that sales of natural cosmetics in Bali and Yogyakarta are rapidly increasing. Geographically, people in these areas prefer natural or traditional ingredients. So, companies increase their stock and run major promotions in these regions. Meanwhile, in other areas like Surabaya and Jakarta, sales of natural cosmetics are not increasing.

Website Interaction Differences Based on Location People in Bali and Yogyakarta prefer to buy cosmetics through mobile apps, people in Surabaya and Jakarta use websites more often, while rural people in Lamongan prefer using Instagram to buy cosmetics.

Needs and Challenges: Understanding user needs and challenges is also important, like mapping out similar and different needs. Some groups need natural cosmetics due to bad experiences with chemicals, while others don’t like natural ingredients.

Details:

Need for Natural Cosmetics:
Need: Users need cosmetics made from natural ingredients.
Challenge: Natural cosmetics tend to be more expensive than chemical ones.

Need for Chemical Cosmetics:
Need: Prefer chemical-based cosmetics because they are instant and long-lasting.
Challenge: They worry about side effects and need products that are 100% safe.

By knowing these trends or patterns, it becomes easier to create great products that meet all their needs based on the detected patterns.

5. Use Research to Develop Your Persona

Each persona from your audience should include the following:

• Persona Name: (Fan, Professional)
• Fictional Name
• Job Title
• Demographics: Age, education, ethnicity, family status
• Environment: Physical, social, technology
• Goals they want to achieve when visiting your site
• Fears or concerns they have
• Quote summarizing what’s important to this persona group

What is meant by “fan”? This refers to an audience that is interested in something and may already know a lot about a particular field. For example, a web development fan looking for a course that can teach them.

A professional, on the other hand, refers to those who work in the field of web development and earn their daily income from this job.

How to Use Audience Personas in Marketing

Creating marketing messages becomes easier once you use audience personas. The target is clear, the message is clear, and relevant content is created that meets the needs and addresses the problems faced by the audience. Without persona data, your business only grows organically and targets various groups without deep understanding.

To better understand what an audience persona looks like, take a look at the web development business and online courses below as an example.

The two images above show two personas: hobbyist and professional, from two different audiences. Because there are two personas, you must automatically create two separate sales promotions that are relevant to the goals of the two audiences. Example promotions are as follows:

Promotional Image 1 targets hobbyists who have long wanted to delve deeper into web development. Therefore, the message should convey an online course with attractive offers taught by professional instructors.

Promotional Image 2 is intended for those who are already professionals in their field. They also want an expert team and are looking for online courses that can help them. This is the promotional message that needs to be conveyed.

By using the above methods, your company’s product and service marketing promotions can reach a higher level. Although creating audience personas can be quite complicated and time-consuming, the results are well worth it once achieved.

Ongoing Process and Allowing Time

Building audience personas usually takes quite a long time and cannot be completed overnight or within a few days. Audience behavior often changes or is inconsistent. For instance, this month, the number of audiences wanting to learn web development is very high, but in the next two months, it drastically decreases, and some even change their goals.

Therefore, to build audience personas, you need to understand at least two things: First, that personas are an ongoing process that adapts to changes and developments. Second, personas take time because they cannot be built quickly.