How to Build an Audience Persona

Audience personas should be outlined in your marketing strategy so you can begin to answer the question, “What does my company need to showcase in order to appeal to the right people?”  Target audience personas include granular details such as age range, demographics, geographic location, titles, personality habits/characteristics, motivators, their pain points, and frequent concerns, and more. 

Deciding how far to go when it comes to defining your different audience groups

When Tackling the Task of Building an Audience Persona, You Need To: 

• Write content that piques their interest 
• Share the content they’d likely engage with
• Target the right people 

Most marketers can conduct research for an audience persona and come away with a well-formed idea of who they need to target, whether it be for a client or new campaign.  The tricky part comes when you’re studying a particular audience and then trying to predict their next steps. The question we want to help you answer is “How far is too far when defining these different audience groups?”  

Each subset of prospective groups has arguably different characteristics that could lead you to create an even more focused audience persona set. Like all things, there is a certain point of diminished return.

Here Are Some Best Practices to Consider When Consolidating Your Audience Pool: 

For Content Audiences: 

Generally, for content personas you want to cast a wide net. It’s much easier to make data-informed decisions based on a large sample size rather than a smaller one. Your overall content strategy should not be hyper-focused—though there are plenty of times you’ll find yourself writing incredibly granular content for your own clients, yourself or even your own organization.

The biggest issue content creators can run into is that people and businesses have an idea in mind of who their ideal customer is. The reality is that there are  actually larger pools of customers you could be missing. When setting an overall content strategy, you want a big pool. Three personas is usually a sweet spot that encompasses your biggest demos.

Later, when you start getting into the day-to-day, it’s time to think about audience segmentation.  For example, if you know for certain that your audience or a client’s audience is a niche group that will be a customer and has previously shown an high conversion rates or return purchases, you should absolutely be writing a storm about and around content that particular niche group will find interesting and keep their interest in your business.  Just be sure you’re measuring and testing to see that that niche audience is who you think it is.

Basic Best Practices On Measuring Audiences/Groups:

• Step One: Always go off your site analytics. That is your on-site traffic—people coming directly to you. Google Analytics gives you good insights that you can incorporate to support your site analytics, including audience interests and a decent breakdown of age and gender. 
• Step Two: Look at past sales, successful campaigns, or even features like your engaged audiences on your organic social media channels. 
• Step Three: Never set and forget personas. As you launch persona campaigns, you’ll  start to see what’s working and what isn’t hitting the mark. Be sure to revisit and evaluate your personas at least twice a year. 

Email Audiences: 

Email audiences are unique when it comes to identifying when you’ve reached a point of having “too small” of an audience group. When that group has reached the point of being insufficient in size to use depends on several factors such as: businesses email practices, limits on your email database, likelihood of that audience being used in the future and size of the sale.   

For instance, a big commercial B2C client shouldn't get down to  individual campaigns  for individual people because the average value order is too small, wouldn't break even and isn't going to be worth it. However, an enterprise client that guarantees each contract or service sold will return millions of dollars may see the worth in singling out that one target. 

The most important thing is having a specific lead nurture in place for your desired audience. This makes building it out much easier as time passes by. The nurture campaign can then be used for the future if another prospect comes by with similar qualifications. When the product or sale potential is truly worth it, like the enterprise example above, it's a different situation than a small one-off sale. Until then, keep this micro-audience information tucked away in its own list of characteristics until it builds up enough influence to be looked at again.  

Like any best practice in audience targeting, it’s always good to start broad and then continue layering those segments on. If and when you decide to set aside an audience pool to grow naturally, be sure to review these lists and contacts during any routine database check-ups. This makes it easier to identify growth in these pools and determine when the list has refined itself enough to stand on its own and become a new audience.

Paid Media Audiences: 

There are actually minimums in place to leverage different audiences within paid media. When considering minimums for paid search, you need at least 1,000 users in a list to be able to exclusively target them. If your audience is not large enough initially, a good practice is to run prospecting campaigns to capture users in the funnel, which will grow your audience pool and allow you to retarget them. This also gets audiences more familiar with your brand, so they are less of a "cold lead" and become a more engaged user that is likely to convert. There are also minimums across social platforms as well, and you can apply this same process to grow your pool.

Audience Strategy:

In terms of strategy here, you can definitely target an audience with a small amount. Our team recommends around 1,000 users for a minimum sample size, but this is ultimately up to you; there's no right or wrong answer here. However, this all depends on what your goal is and how much budget you have to work with. If you want to just close the loop on users who may have abandoned their cart/did not complete your desired action, a smaller group is likely to be fine and just as effective. 

If the goal is more prospecting-focused and you want to increase your reach, a small pool based on different interactions users are taking will likely be too limited to hit your goal The audience size will also be reduced based on whatever geo-targeting you use, or if you narrow it by additional parameters.  

Those should all be taken into consideration along with the client goals when figuring out who should be targeted and if your audience size will be effective. Then when the budget comes into play, the smaller the audience the less budget likely needed. If you do not temper your budget based on audience size, there is the potential to oversaturate them with your messaging (but you want to have a high enough frequency to make an impact, too).

Define Audiences and Discover Success

Audiences are a crucial part to a sound marketing strategy. If you need help defining or growing your audience personas, contact IDX.