One of the best tools for getting into your prospect’s mind is to temporarily become them. You can do this by creating a Persona Profile. Your Persona Profile should be a detailed exploration and description of your target customer, and their life.
Like a police sketch artist, you piece together a composite that creates a vivid picture of them in your mind. It helps tell their story to visualise life from their perspective.
It’s also essential to create Persona Profiles for each type of key decision-maker or influencer you might encounter in your target market.
Here’s an example of Persona Profiles for the Director of a successful financial planning company, Mr Director, and his assistant, Miss Manager.
Mr Director
- Mr Director is 45-60 years old and is a director of a successful financial planning business that has grown steadily over the past ten years. Previously, he had a career working for KPMG and some other large corporates.
- He has a bachelor’s degree and an MBA. He’s married and has two teenage daughters and a younger son.
- He lives in an upper-middle-class suburb in a five-bedroom house that he’s been in for about four years, and he drives a two-year-old Mercedes S-Class.
- He has eighteen staff members and operates from an office building that he owns. His office is a 15-minute drive from home.
- The business has an annual turnover of £4 million, predominantly service-based revenue.
- He has no IT support person on staff and delegates most of the IT and tech responsibilities to his manager, Mrs Manager.
- He spends about £2,000 per month on the various pieces of software that are used in his industry, which gives him access to the most current financial data. He knows the software helps him and his clients, but he also knows that there are many underutilised features.
- His office server and systems are an assortment of various computers mostly installed by his software vendors and have had very little maintenance since installation. The backup systems are archaic and have never actually been tested.
- He’s a football fanatic and supports Liverpool. His office is decorated with footballing paraphernalia. There are photos of him at various matches and with the Liverpool team. Unsurprisingly, he likes to go to all of the home and away matches in his spare time.
- He reads The Guardian and the Economist and his local newspaper.
- He uses an iPhone, which is mostly used for taking pictures, phone calls, email, and social media.
See how this can give you valuable insight into what a prospect’s life looks like? Now let’s look at the influencer Persona Profile.
Miss Manager
- Miss Manager is 29 years old. She’s single and lives in a two-bedroom rented apartment with her cat, Mr Glitter Sparkles.
- She takes public transport to work and commutes daily for about 30 minutes.
- Miss Manager is always smartly dressed and very enthusiastic.
- Miss Manager has been Mr Director’s assistant for the last three years when the company’s growth has really started to accelerate. She’s his right hand, and he’d be totally lost without her.
- She organises Mr Director’s calendar, sets up his pc and iPhone, makes and takes calls on his behalf and much, much more.
- She’s the glue that holds Mr Director’s business together, and she does a bit of everything from ordering stationery to IT to HR.
- Miss Manager is the one that staff go to when something needs to be fixed, ordered or organised.
- Miss Manager is tech-savvy but really out of her depth when it comes to the more technical and strategic aspects of IT systems.
- After work, she usually hits the gym for a workout and loves to watch new shows on Netflix. On weekends she catches up with friends and loves the nightlife.
- She spends a lot of time online reading beauty, fashion and celebrity gossip blogs.
- She’s always glued to her phone, constantly texting and using social media apps.
To take a step further, find an actual image to visually represent your Persona Profile and have it in front of you whenever you’re creating marketing material for them.
Hopefully, by now, you can see how powerful Persona Profiles are. They are the marketing equivalent of method acting. They get you right into the mind of your prospect, a perspective that will be crucial when it comes to crafting your message to your target market
