The art of marketing means drilling down to what your customer demographic looks like from multiple angles; what makes them tick, their personality traits, likes, dislikes, etc. With this information you can start to construct buyer personas and build out a persona map that will help you more effectively reach your target audience with each campaign.
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What is Persona Mapping
Persona mapping is the creation of fictional, but realistic, buyer personas that represent your target customers. They reflect characteristics like personal attributes, goals, motivations, attitudes and more.
Why Use Persona Mapping?
Persona mapping is a deeper way to understand our customers, compared to traditional research and demographic methods. It allows us to create more personalized strategies, therefore positively impacting customer experience.
How to Build a Buyer Persona in 6 Steps
1. Start with basic demographics
2. Decide what else you want to know about your customers
3. Dig deeper
4. Track competitors
5. Analyze traits
6. Check the persona clarity & level of detail
Follow these persona mapping steps to build a buyer persona that fully encapsulates your customer type.
1. Start with basic demographics
Knowing basic demographics such as age, gender, occupation and location is important. Whilst we shouldn’t make assumptions on the persona’s of our customers based on these demographics alone, they do provide initial information.
The way we reach out to customers to find out more intimate details about them, may be affected by their age for example. It can also help us come up with the kind of questions we want to know about these people.
We can find out such demographics using surveys, a social listening platform such as Meltwater Engage, as well as looking at who our existing clients are.
But, persona mapping doesn’t stop there!
2. Decide what else you want to know about your customers
Next, we need to be clear on the type of further information we want to use in our persona mapping and how deep we want to go. Remember, the more detail, the more focused and personalized our customer experience can be.
Here are some questions and topics to consider:
- How many hours do they work?
- What phone do they use?
- Do they use social media? What do they use it for?
- What challenges them in their role?
- What are their career goals?
- What does an average day in the life look like?
- What are their values?
- What do they do in their free time?
These can help you formulate this customers idea buying experience, increasing the likelihood that they not only purchase from you, but become fans of your brand and, hopefully, returning customers.
A tool like Meltwater Consumer Intelligence can help you hone in on real data, too, so you're creating a buyer personal from a real place, rather than pure conjecture.
There are a number of persona mapping templates out there that have the kind of questions we should be asking. Here are some top recommended to try:
3. Dig deeper
Finding out more intimate details about your customers provides a much stronger basis from which to target your communications because your'e working beyond superficial assumptions such as gender and age.
Media monitoring tools can help us understand the topics of conversation, tonality and the social networks our audience interacts with. We can also learn more about the influencers our target audience interacts with, what they read, talk about, and how they communicate.
This can give us greater insight into our target audience’s aspiration and lifestyle. A combination of media monitoring, focus groups and surveys are likely to provide us with an overall picture of our target market.
Tip: Online Tribes enable you to better understand your audience's mindsets.
4. Track competitors
Tracking and monitoring your competitors to see who they are targeting is another key element to persona mapping for marketers. It helps us stay in the know for our industry. Keeping up-to-date with who our competitors are targeting means we can easily spot new market opportunities or threats.
Like we mentioned above, you can also use social media monitoring to learn about the positive and negative experiences of your competitor’s customers — what are they complaining or raving about? By learning more about our potential customers, you can better adapt our approach to customer experience and stand out against the competition.
5. Analyze traits
Once armed with these details, you can begin to group personality traits together. Try to avoid going back to the “basic” targeting approach, such as grouping all of the ‘marketing manages, males, those who are / aren’t married’.
With all the information we have collected, we can create a number of specific personas by common interests, lifestyles and work roles. Simply keeping a tally of recurrent answers will allow us to begin grouping traits to create our personas.
6. Check the persona clarity & level of detail
Alex Coreactwan — entrepreneur, advisor and CRM expert — has created lots of helpful content surrounding persona mapping. His ‘React’ method, as shown below, is great for checking whether we’ve gone deep enough with our persona mapping:
- Real: Ensure our personas represent the customers we currently have, not the ones we want. Also, don’t create convenient archetypes, ensure personas are based on substantial research.
- Exact: Similar to the previous point, don’t over generalize — create specific persona’s that are more than ‘male 45-55’.
- Actionable: Are we able to create a customer strategy based on the persona’s we have? If not we need to dig deeper to find out more about each persona.
- Clear: Could someone else understand the persona? Would they be able to tell a story about the day in the life of the persona? If they can’t, then we need to go back and make this possible.
- Testable: Test the personas in the field. Perhaps go back to interview subjects and ask if they feel the persona represents them. Adapt communication strategies to suit our new personas. See how audiences are reacting to the communication. Are more people engaging? Is the sentiment towards our brands more positive?
That should get you started with persona mapping!
Remember that personas need to be updated regularly to ensure they stay relevant. Once you have a better idea of who you're targeting, mapping content to each individual and their life cycle stage is made that much easier. Learn more about content mapping in our Ebook.
Want to find out more about how Meltwater social listening and consumer intelligence solutions can help you learn about your audience? Fill in the form below and we’ll be in touch!
