“A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
-Sam Kusinitiz, HubSpot
What is a Digital Persona?
Digital personas are fictional characters created to assess how different individuals interact with an organization's digital tactics. They outline bigger picture pieces like target audience information along with understanding any public they may belong to.
How do I create a Digital Persona?
The first step to creating digital personas is to segment your market based on demographic and psychographic information. Then, get creative. Creating a persona is about combining audience research and also defining their loves, dreams, goals, how they use tech, why they live where they do, etc. These characters are the imaginary best friend of the digital marketer and like a best friend, you want to know as much about them as you can.
The only hard and fast rule to creating personas is the more detail you provide, the better your persona will serve you. Also, find a picture from a stock photo site to represent your character (pexels/unsplash are both free if your company doesn’t have a subscription to a paid service).
Finally, avoid over-arching generalizations when creating your personas. Although some should reflect major demographic groups, part of the goal is to address both people who are in your front windshield and those in your blind spot. This will ensure your communications strategy reaches all the facets of your audience you wish to influence.
What headings should I include in my digital persona?
Create headings based on the information you feel is most pertinent to your organization’s communications goals. I like to create a brief ‘day in the life’ section to really get a feeling for what this person would experience in an average day. What media would they consume? How would they access it? Would they face barriers in accessing tech? What messaging would they consume?
At Click Minnow, we can use the answer to these questions to define your audience to ensure your message is targeted directly to those you want to reach.
*Based on James Grunig’s definition of a publics (audience which self-forms in response to a problem) introduced in his Situational Theory of Public Behaviour.
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