How to Create a Persona for Your Audience
In business, the phrase ‘buyer persona’ describes the ideal hypothetical person who would buy from you.
This term is incredibly useful but the name is a little limiting. Because in reality, a persona need not only be a buyer: it could just as well be someone who might become a follower of your social media accounts, or of your mailing list.
Creating a Persona
To create a persona then, the first thing you need to do is to think about the kind of brand you have and who that is likely to appeal to.
The mistake that far too many people make is to try and create a brand, product or channel that will appeal to everyone. This sounds great on paper but in reality, it means that your brand is going to be necessarily generic.
If something appeals to everyone, then it won’t appeal specifically to anyone. In other words, it won’t really get anyone all that excited. The things we are passionate about tend to be our personal hobbies and interests.
So if you’re going to create a fitness site, you need to choose the precise kind of person that you want to target. Is this person someone out of shape looking to get healthy? Or is it a hardcore powerlifter?
By making your brand target the hardcore powerlifter, you are of course actively alienating a portion of your audience. This may seem counterproductive but for the right people – the powerlifters – your channel just became fascinating. It became their bread and butter. And they’re going to want to sign up almost instantly when they see your brand.
So, decide on this person and then write down some things about them:
* What are their hobbies and interests?
* How old are they?
* What gender?
* What kind of income do they have?
Using the Persona
Now you have built your persona, you can start to think about how to target this hypothetical person specifically.
As briefly mentioned, this means creating a logo that they are going to see and instantly be drawn to. It should say precisely what your site is about and it should make them excited to sign up.
Likewise, use this to think about what kind of other things they might be interested in. What else could you blog about? What else could you promote? Where else might you find more people like them?
