Step 15: Map Your Personas

Personas are detailed descriptions of your ideal target customer or client – from their needs, motivations, goals, habits to their career to their preferred communication channels, media they consumer, technology they use, and how they prefer to be engaged by a brand.

Just like an interior designer pulls together a mood board, start with a whiteboard or blank manila sheet.

Add notes, stickers, magazine cutouts, statistics, photos, colours, etc. to bring your persona to life. Interrogate the board, making sure the persona you’re creating is as realistic as possible.Use friends, colleagues and people in the media as inspiration.

Ask the hard questions about how they think, what they buy, read, like, how they live, shop, eat, sleep and even how they use the Internet.

Then distil the learnings into a formal document.

You should then use these personas to guide any/all brand development and ongoing content planning.

Please note these personas will evolve over time, based on new research, changes in the state of play and asset reporting.

By identifying these target audience personas, you’ll be able to pick which messaging/core value propositions, keywords and channels to target them with in order to access them.

The idea is to reward the audience’s engagement with social kudos, pride, confidence and rewards in the offline and online spaces they live.

• A website strategy - to target your general wider audience and reward their engagement when looking for workable solutions on your website to help them maximize their lifestyles, habits, needs and desires.

• A social strategy - Facebook, Instagram and the website, etc - will attract, support and encourage other peripheral consumers who are less confident and vocal in the communications landscape.

• An advertising strategy - to drive traffic and leads. 

• A comprehensive key opinion leaders strategy - to target your business and social audience to add a sense of trust and integrity in your brand or products.

• An offline strategy - to target them when they’re not surfing social media or the web. This includes how to reach them on TV, radio, print, events and even spaces they inhabit like malls, ball parks and streets.