Steps to Create Audience Personas That Get Results

Knowing exactly who your audience is, is so important. Knowing your audience is more about knowing what an individual user is like than an overall demographic. What is your audience doing on a Tuesday evening? What keeps them up at night?
* Research Current Customers – If you already have customers, look at the data that you collect in analytics from social media, your shopping cart, your website visitors, and any other data you can look at. If you do not have customers, try to use your competition’s information, surveys, and other information you can gather.
* Look for Trends – When you see the data, it’s important to look for trends. Do you notice a pattern? Are most of your audience members men or women? What age are they on average? How much money do they earn? What do they do in their free time?
* Draw a Picture – Once you have the data organized and have realized there are trends, use the most prominent trend to draw a picture of your audience persona. You can also cut out pictures from magazines to represent your ideal audience member.
* Name Them – Once you’ve drawn the picture, go so far as to give them names that you expect your audience members to use. This will help you think of that person in your mind as you create, organize, and plan the content that you’ll share with your users.
* Know Their Goals – Know what goals your audience members have. Some will have different goals. Pick the most common top three to five goals and ambitions so that you know where your audience wants to go.
* Understand Their Fears – Everyone has fears; try to identify your audience’s fears. Is it being fat? Being sick? Not living a full life? Are they afraid of not having enough money or time in the day to do right by their kids? When you can name the fear, you can name the product they need.
* Identify Their Pain Points – Fears often go right along with pain points. Is your audience too hungry, too busy, too sick, or too tired to do what they need to do fix their problems? How can you help?
* Take It Further – Try to dig a little bit further into your audience’s personality so that you can direct the content, marketing, products and more right to them. They’ll think you can read your mind if you learn to do this effectively.
Once you create an audience persona, you can use that to help you create the best content. You can even give copies of your audience personas to outsourcers to use to help them with website design, content writing, product creation and more.