Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Identifying Personas

After you understand what your customers do online, you can begin to define them more clearly. To do this, you can create what are known as personas. Personas are customer profiles that represent your actual buyers. Alan Cooper first wrote about personas in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum. He wrote, “We don’t so much make up our personas as discover them as a byproduct of the investigation process.” That is exactly what you need to do.

Some marketers swear by personas; others find it difficult to wrap their heads around it. We recommend the creation of personas because they help you stay focused on the buying strategies that matter. For example, suppose you identify your customer as a 45-year-old male who has an annual income of more than $90,000 and a family with two children less than 12 years old.

When you are developing your SMM campaign, you can stop your team from developing copy for a young woman of college age. This may sound obvious, but it’s easy to get off track when the ideas are flying fast and furious. When a fun notion pops into someone’s head, it can be helpful to look at your persona and think it through. You can remain focused and course-correct when you find you are getting away from the heart of the profile.

So what information goes into creating a good customer persona? Consider the following:

Demographics: Obviously, you want ...