Crafting Marketing Personas for Targeted Communication

We have that one-page overview sheet starting with their name and avatar, their job titles, repeat the Project Manager, their age, their degree, what social networks they're on, and why that's important, you know, the ones that are darker, I mean, that's what they're on, right? Why is that important? I have an understanding of what platforms I need to be on to reach them, right? So, Instagram, I can reach them by Instagram, the preferred method of communication, so maybe I can add a phone or email to my social media ads as opposed to using WhatsApp, right? Their responsibilities, these are the things that weighs them down, these are the things that they're thinking about, so I want to reach them, I can provide content, blog content, web content, social content, addressing some of these areas, providing, you know, tips and, you know, case studies or advice or something along those lines. Who to report to, the vice president of operations, maybe understanding how that person may influence a decision or be the ultimate decision maker, right, and how that might play into the sell-in process. They gain information, one other point to be made when we talk about sources of information, and I mentioned company data, maybe the best source of information are your employees, particularly those on the front line with customers, you know, the customer reps on the line, on the phones, the salespeople, visiting customers and clients, people working in your stores with direct interaction with your customers.

They'll know a lot about what's driving your customer's behavior, they'll know by the questions they ask, by the reasons they say no to a sale with a sales rate, right, they'll know about which products are most, you know, seemingly most significant to them and what they're complaining about, right, so it's another great source of information. So, speaking of information, where they gain information from, well, they read industry blogs, so we could provide blog material for them, right, content, company training, online courses, right, so you get a broader picture of how they're ingesting information. Now, you know, at some point of the sales journey that you hope you're going to get them to go on, where they first become aware of your product and, you know, you're branding your product and you're offering, then if they are at a point of, you know, purchasing a similar, a product like this, they're going to probably go through consideration, right, you have to be aware of the brand and then once you're aware of it, you're going to compare it to other options before you purchase, especially a purchase such as business software.

There's a huge social or career risk to that. If you make the wrong decision, it's not just that you lose money as with a consumer decision, you might not lose any money at all, but if it's, you know, if it's not your own business, you're doing it on behalf of your company, but you can lose your job, right, and if you are, you know, the owner of, you know, a smaller business and you make a decision, you know, it's coming straight from your bottom line. So, you know, for decisions like that, people, you know, prospective customers are going to go through some consideration and where might they look for information around that, industry blogs and such, so that's why you want not just to create your own blog content, but be able to be featured in other blogs, reach out to blogs in your industry and, you know, but again, getting back to the point from your persona, you get an understanding of, you know, where they get information from, the tools they need to do their job, right, and obviously some of these tools are going to be met by the Asana product, right, it will likely have some of these features and that means when you are targeting this audience with your marketing communications, you want to focus on those features and the solutions those features provide to the challenges that this person, this consumer has and here you see on the bottom, their biggest challenges, right, so and you can show how you provide a solution from the tools that are part of this platform and you can address and let them know that by using your platform, they are going to meet their objective, they're going to become more efficient, they're going to come in under budget, they'll be able to advance their career, these are brand promises that can become part of your communication strategy and let them know that the ultimate result will be greater efficiency, greater productivity and most of all, their projects will come in, you know, on time and under budget which is, you know, the most important thing that you've identified for them, right, so putting it all on one page like this, your entire organization can be on the same page regarding this.

So let me just one other thing I want to show, if you click on the other tool, it's set up very similar, just build your persona and it'll take you down this path, right, what would you like to name your persona, right, and avatar and then they'll start asking you questions that are more specific to consumers as opposed to professionals, right, so check that out, we do a little bio on your consumer and right, so we're only going to do the HubSpot one for this particular course but I advise you to play around with both of them and, you know, now you understand the important role that a persona can for, you know, play with in developing your marketing strategy. In the next section, section three, we'll be discussing types of Instagram posts, how to edit your posts and reels, and have an exercise where you can put it all together and create a demo post.