Creating Personas: Know Your Target Market
Know who you are writing for.
It’s such an important rule when it comes to copywriting.
Keeping your audience in mind when you write helps to maintain your tone of voice so that your writing continuously resonates with your target market.
In fact, a tried and tested method of keeping focused on your target market is to create personas.
In this post, I share what personas are and share an overview on how to create personas.
What Are Personas?
Wikipedia defines personas as:
A fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.
Essentially, it is an imaginary person that closely resembles your target market.
It is a technique many marketers use to help keep their brand’s messaging resonate with their desired end-user.
For copywriters, it is a nifty exercise to have in place to help write your copy as if you are talking with this imaginary character.
That said, personas are not just for copywriters, it is also suitable for UX designers to help them develop a site that’s colourful and easy to use.
In addition, brand managers can also use this information to help them create brand guidelines for both design and copy.
Developing Personas
There are many ways to create personas. Many marketing agencies will follow a textbook approach to formulating personas.
This will involve doing in depth research in the target market where they'll identify their strengths, weaknesses, preferences and dislikes as well as their knowledge level of the product their looking to sell. They’ll also assign them a sex too.
Using this information, marketers will create a fictional character and give this character a name. Some even go as far as assigning a picture
For example, if you’re selling an online email marketing software product that requires no coding knowledge to marketers, an example persona will look like below:
Name: Cathy
- Sex: Female
- Strengths: Social media marketing, engaging personality
- Weakness: No tech/coding background, little experience of using software products
- Preferences: loves bright colours, little text
- Dislikes: Hates reading long text and academic journals
From a copy perspective, there’s a lot you can take from this.
We can establish that the tone of voice we need to aim for needs to be jargon-free and that the content needs to be presented in easy-to-digest short paragraphs.
What's more, this exercise can help us identify a key selling point that we need to emphasise on , which is ease of use - something that is of huge importance to Cathy.
Are Personas Perfect?
In short, they’re helpful in helping identifying your target market.
Plus, you don’t have to stick to one persona, you can create multiple personas if your product, service or brand has multiple target markets.
Creating the right persona does take time. Ideally, if you have the resources to do market research, then you will get in depth data on your target audience.
However, if you don’t have access to a market research company, then you can make your persona just by taking to a friend who would be interested in the product or service. That said, it is handy to have your persona backed up with solid data.