If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, you’re probably reading (and watching!) all you can about it. During your exploration you may come across the term ‘marketing personas’ and wonder what on Earth that could mean. Remember your invisible friend from when you were younger? (We all had one, right?) Well, marketing personas are kind of like them, but a little more grown-up.
This article explores what marketing personas are, how they work, and how you can create yours. For personalised advice, contact our team at practiceedge today.
What Are Marketing Personas
Marketing personas are essentially a fictional representation of who you want to sell your products and/or services to. While you generally want your audience to be as wide-reaching as possible, sometimes the best way to do this is to ‘speak’ to specific buyers individually. Unfortunately, not many people have time for that, especially busy healthcare professionals! That’s where marketing personas come in.
What Do Marketing Personas Look Like?
Each marketing persona represents a different demographic of a business’ target audience. Generally you will have one persona for each ‘group’ of customers, all of which have similar lifestyles, buyer journeys, and goals.
For example, if you’re looking to attract more patients to your women’s health services, you may want to create a marketing persona of the ‘typical’ patient you want to reach. In this instance, they may be a 40-year-old mother of two who drives a Hyundai and works part-time in a retail store.
Or if you’re a physiotherapist hoping to expand further into sports physio, you may want to create a persona of a university student who plays football on the weekends, or a woman in her 50s who wants to get back into playing netball for fun but is experiencing some physical barriers.
The good news is, you don’t need to tie yourself down to one persona per group. Have as many as you like! We recommend you start small so you don’t get overwhelmed, and you can develop more as time goes on.
How Do Marketing Personas Work?
Marketing personas work by helping you to identify who you’re speaking to when you or your marketing team work to attract a patient or client. Think of them as a way of getting into your audience’s minds, if you will.
While not every patient will fit into a persona 100% of the time, the person you intend to reach with this persona will recognise bits and pieces of themselves within them. This persona should speak to them and lead them to recognise that you understand their way of life and what it is they’re looking to achieve. This helps you to create meaningful content that your audience will want to engage with, ultimately increasing your patient numbers and that all-too-important ROI.
How To Create Marketing Personas
Now that you know why marketing personas are so important and how they work, it’s time to find out how to create your own!
1. Gather Information
Collecting as much background information about each group as you can is paramount. Research, research, research! You can do this by talking to people (in person or online), whether you have an established client base or not. Surveys and online feedback forms are also great ways to find out who you’re talking to and as much relevant information about them as possible.
Try to find out as much as you can about a persona’s:
- Age
- Occupation
- Lifestyle
- Pain points
- Location
- Language
- Channels (where you can connect with them)
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, consider how your product or service may help them.
2. Consolidate The Intel
When you’ve collected all the necessary information, consolidate what you’ve got. Categorise everything as best you can in order to pinpoint answers that pop up regularly, such as specific pain points or certain age groups. You may discover information you hadn’t considered before, which may help you to uncover whole new personas you can market to!
3. Write It Out
Firstly, identify how many personas you’re going to create. Give yourself an hour or so to work on each one (though you may need more or less time). Whiteboards tend to come in handy here, as the journey to identifying a persona can get messy!
Identify segments and organise them into rough drafts, focusing on segments including age ranges (for example, 25-35 or 60-70), channels, their job titles, and/or any other defining characteristics that may be relevant.
4. Identify And Personalise
If it helps, you can think of marketing personas as ‘buying personas’. Think of each persona as an individual buyer and give them a name, a job, a hobby, a home life, and the pain points they want to overcome. Get creative and write a paragraph or two to describe each persona so that you can get to know them and have them stick in your mind.
Looking For Help With Marketing Personas?
At practiceedge, we work with marketing personas for busy healthcare professionals day in and day out. Whether you’re a GP, dentist, or chiropractor, we understand just how to dig into your client base and create the marketing personas that will help you the most. To find out more about how we create marketing personas and how we can create them for you, book a call with us today.
