What is a digital marketing persona?

A digital marketing agency is in charge of connecting with consumers. A marketer will tell stories, grab attention and bring in sales and lead generation, but a marketer who does not understand their persona, could be the reason for a lack of results which would result with a frustrated client. 

Marketers, stop thinking in the sense “would I enjoy this?” There is a small chance that YOU are the target audience. A great example would be a client who is in the investment banking industry. As a marketer, you would be interested in the basics of business, but often times, those in the investment banking world are large corporations and companies with big-wigs searching for their products. 

The CEO and CFO do not need a “business 101” article, these “personas” would need some in-detail marketing about their options for capital raising, mergers and acquisitions, leveraged finance and even more! 

This is why a person for each digital marketing client is imperative for a digital marketing agency. 

What are personas? 

A persona is defined as, “archetypal character created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product a similar way.” A persona is a holistic profile of customers or consumers who will be interacting, buying and who a company will be reaching out to. 

What drives your persona to purchase your products or services? What would make them hesitate to purchase your products or services? A persona goes beyond the common job position and demographic questions to understand who exactly will be purchasing those products and services. 

A persona is critical to a digital marketing strategy because without a persona, no one will be purchasing or interacting with the company. It is imperative to understand how to attract the right audience with the right messaging and how these messages align with how a company’s consumers and customers would feel. 

How to create a persona 

Ask the right questions 

Stop asking the surface questions, the companies who are searching for investment banking strategies have different worries and fears than the next company. Each company is different, each decision-maker is different and each reasoning for the services provided are different. How do you create content for all of these reasons? 

First, what does each persona or company have in common? Well, the company needs help in understanding x, y and z with their goals in mind. Remember relevance at any moment. As a digital marketing agency, sit down with the client and ask them  who their persona is, or a target audience as we call it, because these people are the experts in their industries. 

Here are some common questions to ask: 

• Age? 
• Education?
• Career?
• Interests?
• Where do they consume information from?
• What are three adjectives they would describe themselves with? 

Research and research

The next step is to research and research and more research. Once a marketer is done speaking with the client about their personas, it is now time to consolidate all of their answers and find the correlations between ALL of the different opinions. It is quite possible that there are one to three different personas as one starts to break down the notes. 

From there, how do these personas navigate and use social media and search engines to find your clients? Are these consumers Bing users or Google? Yes, people use other search engines besides Google. Are these consumers one would consider intelligent in a number of different industries? What decisions are they making in a company? 

Once the brainstorming is there, how do your client’s KPIs align with the personas and how they navigate through the digital world. 

Always understand as a marketer to tell the story of how your client’s company helps to solve an issue, resolve internal problems and overall makes their lives easier on a day-to-day basis. 

For more information on digital marketing strategies, contact Monstrous Media Group today!