Digital Marketing Segmentation | Defining Personas

One of the tools that present-day marketers use to help with segmentation is what is known as ‘Personas’. Market segments are based on broad commonalities of a particular audience. These may include demographic data, psychographic data and behavioral data among a host of other things. From a strategic standpoint, they are really useful in identifying which part of the overall audience is worth going after.

In order to determine the how, we need to develop suitable personas. Personas are highly-specific representations of the actual individuals who make up a particular marketing segment. Think of them as a representative individual who is ‘personified’ – giving marketers the ability to predict behavior, usage and reactions.

Although segments are strategic in nature and personas are more tactical, they both share one goal – helping you understand your customers so you can market to them better! When your segments are well researched and clearly defined, they will result in the creation of better personas.

The origin of personas

Personas originated in the field of programming and user experience design. The practitioners of these fields needed a way to better understand how typical users of the products they designed would understand and work with them to resolve actual problems. Otherwise, the product/experience design team was likely to get carried away with ‘cool’ ideas that did nothing to add value to the lives of the intended users. All form and no functionality would result in an interesting but largely-unused product!

Visualizing the ideal persona

Whatever data you choose to include in your persona, remember to visualize how that persona would look. It is helpful to include some personal information about the persona as that humanizes it rather than making it a statistics-filled demographic drone.

For example: Think of your audience as “Fresh Graduate in his first full-time job with an active social life who gyms thrice-a-week” rather than “18 to 24 year old male who has just started working”. While both attribute statements are likely to define the target audience, the former is more personal and offers you a way to connect with the audience. The latter just spews facts at you.

Another example: Thinking of your persona in terms of “Middle-aged family man with two teenaged kids and home-maker wife who is paying for a housing loan and a car loan but is keen on a foreign vacation for the family”, will provide more insights into financial product selection motivations rather than “Salaried male 34 to 45, seeking personal loan”. You get the picture!

No matter how you choose to go about defining your audience persona, remember one thing. Personas exist in the minds of the marketer – not the minds of the audience themselves. Every member of the audience would like to view themselves as unique individuals with a custom set of circumstances and motives. So try to be a tad objective with persona definition rather than making it painfully specific. After all, the objective behind creating personas is to enable you to reach out to a reasonably similar audience with reasonably similar motivations!