The importance of defining a Persona

 

The main thing is to understand what a marketing plan is: how ideas como to life. Until they don’t find a place in a plane they’re idle thoughts. Write a good marketing plan is a critical skill for a marketing leader, who improves the skill by practice + strategic framework. You need time for understanding the brand, consumers, insight, strategies…

A marketing plan lays out your recommendation for a business. It is not a science. There are two reasons to write a marketing plan à COMMUNICATE A PLAN AND GET SUPPORT FOR IT.

For writing the best marketing plan we use a planning model: SOSTAC.

 

Targeting your customers means defining your clients by their characteristics, behaviours, need and wants. So that analysis must be based in demographics data and psychographics variables.

 

Once you have all this information you can define your persona. Ardath Albee describes  a marketing persona as a composite sketch of a key segment of our audience. For content marketing purposes you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.

So that persona must be defined by the information you had analysed and obtained. This persona must show all the characteristics of your strategic client.

 

HOW TO DEFINE A PERSONA?

Your persona should include not only demographics (age, gender, salary, localitation, education, family) but also his/her motivations and what is more important their values and lifestyles.

 

Where can you find all this information?

There are many sources of information on your audience, from the tiny details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. You can look for information about your customers in:

• Your web analytics

Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, what keywords they used to find you…

• Your team

All your company departments could help you to built that persona. Anyone with interactions with customers and customer data should be involved.

• Your social media

• Ask your audience

The more information you get the best will help you.

 

Here we have an example of persona:

 

How many persona should I defining?

Depending on your business or target you could have different persona, the most important thing is to have a persona for every strategic client you have in your company. You have to keep in mind that your persona will be the person on the strategy will be based in, so you will have to defining as many personas as you think you are going to focus on.

 

Why is so important?

By defining a persona you help the creators to get into character, that specific data is a good way to understand the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of your clients. Also that could help the company to find news opportunities for their products or services. But the most important thing, the defining process must help you to find the insights that make your customer keep being your customer.

 

Mónica Enériz

Glossary – SOSTAC

The SOSTAC is a marketing model, a way to set up a digital marketing strategy. It was created by PR. Smith in 1990 and formalized in 2004 with  his book “Strategic Marketing Communications”.

It stands for: Situation analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactis, Actions and Control.

SOSTAC is an extension of the SWOT analysis. The main difference is that SOSTAC is more focused in the implementation stages of the process and on marketing communications.

The six steps inside SOSTAC are:

1. Situation analysis: asses were a business is precently. It is an analysis about the customer (their characteristics, behaviors, needs, wants, personality, values, attitudes, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, etc.), the market, competitors (benchmark), intermediaries, influencers, potencial partners, wider macro enviroment (PESTEL) OVP (online value proposition) and a SWOT analysis.
2. Objectives: sets the mission or goals for the business. What do we want? (sell, serve, talk, save and impact) and goals (they have to be SMART: specific, mesurable, achivable, realistic and in time. And they have to RACE: rech, act, converse and engage).
3. Strategy: is an overview of how to achive the objectives. It neds a segmentation of the audience, positioning comparing to the competitors, do a brand strategy and create a digital stratgey (with a digital channel and the companies social media platforms) to reach to the audience, make them act, convert them to the brand and engage them.
4. Tactics: are the detailed approach of how to achieve the business goal, how to get to that goal. We can get there by marketing mix, including the communications mix and social networking.
5. Actions: are used to determinate who does what and when. They are the details og tactics. Is important to determinate which actions are we going to take making the difference between the internal and the external ones. And it has to be followed by systems and processes made to do corretly the actions.
6. Control: establishes how the process is monitored. It consists on, for example, tracking the visits on the website, to know where are they from. The website can be motorized by web analytics, with KPI (keep performance indicator), customer satisfaction surveys, frequency of reporting, usability testing and mystery shopping.