Building meaningful personas for your marketing outreach efforts can help you relate and deliver relevant information to your customers. Learn how develop personas that accurately represent your current and target audiences. These personas will help you develop the right content to the right people on the right platform.

1. Developing Personas
for Effective Marketing
Marisa Peacock
The Strategic Peacock

2. What Are Marketing Personas?
In user-centered design and marketing, personas are
fictional characters created to represent the different user
types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar
way

3. How Are Personas Used in
Marketing?
To better target their marketing
messages, marketers have used
customer acquisition and past
buying behavior data to better
understand their audience in
terms of demographics,
psychographics and interests.

4. How to Create Marketing
Personas

5. Identify Target Audiences
• Where does your audience live online?
• Is your current audience your target audience?
• What behaviors does your audience exhibit?
• What types of content do they engage with?
• What problems do they have? What interests them?

6. Use Tools to Gather Intelligence
• Hootsuite Plug-in: demographics pro
• Demographics Pro (Paid version)
• Social Bro (Twitter Only)
• Twitter, Facebook Insights
• Simply Measured’s free tools

7. Who is your persona?
• What is his/her name and
age?
• What does s/he look like and
how does s/he dress?
• What level of education does
s/he have?
• Where is s/he located? Is it a
city or the country?
• What are his/her living
arrangements?

8. What does your persona do
for a living?
• What is his/her job?
• Is his/her identify tied to his/her work or
profession?
• How much money does s/he make?
• What are his/her feelings towards
money? Is s/he a penny pincher or
generous?
• Does s/he keep a budget? Does s/he
save or invest money on a regular
basis?
• How does s/he pay for purchases?
Does s/he use cash, debit cards, credit
cards or electronic payment systems?

9. What are the persona’s non-
work interests and/or hobbies?
• What are his/her hobbies? Are
they outwardly or inwardly
focused?
• Is the persona healthy? If not,
what type of health issues
does s/he have and how do
they effect /her life?
• What does the character
believe with regard to politics,
religion and other major
issues?

10. Define the Customer Journey
Creating buyer personas and journeys can help determine what
kind of content you need; set the tone, style, and delivery
strategies for your content; target the topics you should be
writing about; and understand where buyers find and consume
information.

11. Customer Journey Mapping
A customer journey map tells the story of
the customer’s experience: from initial
contact, through the process of
engagement and into a long-term
relationship.

12. How to Map the Customer
Journey
Analytical Research
• search data: what are people searching for? what
keywords are they usingCustomer Journey Mapping
• userflow: where are they entering your site? where
are they exiting your site?
• sharing media: what information are they sharing
organically from your site or about you?

13. How to Map the Customer
Journey
Anecdotal Research
• customer service data: talk to your salespeople,
call agents, receptionists? What are the FAQs,
biggest pain points?
• talk to customers: what do they want to find?
where do they want to find it?

14. Just Map It!
• Where do they start their search? (online search, social
media, website, mobile devices, offline, phone, email, etc)
• What do they want? (how much it costs, what it does,
who’s involved, technical specs, photos & video)
• What call to action appeals most to them? (read more,
learn more, give now, download, watch, contact us, etc)
• What happens after they accomplish their goals?
(email follow-up, sign up for newsletter, phone call, text
message, social media shout-out, etc)

15. Manage & Track
• After you’ve identified your user personas and
mapped their customer journeys, keep track of their
experiences — set tangible and intangible goals.
• How will you know if everything is working?
What will it look like? What analytics and anecdotal
evidence will you look for?

16. Thank you!
Marisa Peacock
marisa@strategicpeacock.com
@marisacp51
www.strategicpeacock.com