How to Build your Audience Persona

THE WHY

Let’s quickly highlight why it is important to know your audience persona. If you identify their persona you would be able to effectively reach them, communicate with them and most importantly empathize with them.

It’s always more effective when you speak to your audience and hit a nerve so to speak. If you know their pains and struggles, your content needs to address those and resolve them. If you know where they get their information, you need to be there to reach them. If you know what their goals and aspirations are, you need to help them achieve it. Only then would they pay attention to you, because – wait for it- you’re adding value to their lives.

BUILDING

Ok, so now you know why, lets get building on your audience persona.

If you already have a following, I suggest you start analyzing their data by answering the questions below

If you don’t have a following yet, use the set of questions below to imagine what sort of audience you wish to speak with.

Here are 24 guiding questions to help you build your audience persona

Personal background

1. Their Age
2. Their Gender
3. Their education level,
4. Family status
5. Fitness level
6. Income level

Career

1. What’s their job?
2. Working hour
3. Transportation method

Hobbies

1. When is their free time?
2. What do they do for fun?

Goals

1. What goals are they trying to achieve?
2. Why are these goals important? 

Pains

1. What’s their pain point
2. What makes them cry or frustrated

Decision making/ challenges

1. What are the biggest challenges that prevent them from achieving their objectives? Mentally, physically…
2. who or what influences their decisions

Objections/ Complaints

1. What might be their biggest complaints about your product or service?
2. What must happen for you to overcome these complaints?

Information sources

1. What publications, blogs or social media networks do they use?
2. What social media accounts do they follow?
3. What Hashtags do they follow?
4. Do they belong to any social, professional or networking group?
5. How do they like to get their news? Online, offline,

Let’s funnel those questions into buckets to put it into perspective:

Now that you’ve done the hard work, go the extra and essential mile by doing some external research. Who are your top competitors? what do they do? how do they communicate with their audience? what kind of content do thy use? and which of their content has the highest engagement? (comments not likes) What hashtags they use? See if you can get any additional insights to add into your knowledge of who your audience are.

FINALLY…

By now you should have a full picture of who your audience are and what motivates them and engages them.

BTW, you can create as many personas as you wish, this is an excellent idea to be more niche and personalized (female audience vs male audience, vs full time employees vs, full time mummy) be as specific as possible so you can create content that is more tailored to the persona.

I can’t stress this enough, have fun and be emotionally invested as you build and create personas, it will help you create content that gets straight to their heart. As unique as their fears, goals, challenges, aspirations and expectations are, you need to be building targeted content. If you’re enjoying what your doing it will reflect your true desires and empathy towards your audience.

Now go out there and build personas and awesome content xx