Blog and News > lead-generation-marketing > Using Personas to Build Your Audience
Using Personas to Build Your Audience
The benefits of analytics as a tool to help webmasters understand where their visitors are coming from and how they behave on their websites are clearly known and understood, but what many people don't realize is that analytics has other benefits too. Through the use of tools such as personas you can build up a clearer profile of your target audience, allowing you to not just get more traffic,but get better traffic - traffic that will more easily convert.
#What Are Personas? Personas are characters - profiles of people who are a part of your target audience. Each persona is categorized by age, income, interests and other identifiers, giving you an idea of who they are, what drives them and the barriers they face to being a customer of yours. For example, one persona may be an elderly retired person who is not very tech-savvy. Another may be a young low-income person who has the interest to engage with your brand but not the financial means to buy your most expensive products.
Some marketing companies have their own lists of personas. Some trade organizations have them too - for example, Sport England has defined the “types” of people who are interested in sport, ranging from Ben the young athlete to Chloe the fitness enthusiast and Terry the older man who is preparing for his retirement. These profiles are designed to help sports clubs understand who they are dealing with, and to help them understand why some people love their club but others rarely attend.
Using personas, you can identify your current customer base and figure out ways to make things better for them. You can also identify people who you are failing to reach, and then you can decide whether you want to reach them or whether trying to serve them would alienate your existing customers. There is no right or wrong answer here - some groups simply will never be your customers unless you are willing to completely change your product or service, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.
Personas are a brilliant form of analysis tool for your business. They are a great way to guide and inform your marketing campaigns and to improve your understanding of who your customers are and what they want. They can help you to ask the right questions and to make the most efficient improvements to your products.
Tim
