<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Personas.jpg" alt="Personas" width="232" height="180" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-8898" />If you’ve never heard of personas in business, they refer to a marketing tool for building a blog or business to encourage user engagement and loyalty. Examples of personas include buyer personas or reader personas which are used by bloggers to make marketing easier and more effective.  If you want to use the powerful tool of personas in your business and blog, here is a look at what personas are all about and how to utilize them. 

<h2>What is a persona and why is it important?</h2>

Buyer personas are known as “reader personas” and they are a fictional description to represent your target audience. While fictional, they are based on data and it can be as little as a short bio to as long as a few pages of a description. 

They are created through research to represent who buyers are, what they want to accomplish, how they think and why they make buying decisions. They are important for understanding your target audience in order to write more effective blog posts. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, you should be appealing to a target audience to build a following and be a more effective blogger. 

Be sure to be specific in choosing your target audience; rather than business owners, target owners of small business or business owners of a specific field. The smaller the audience, the more focused your marketing will be. 

<h2>Creating the Persona</h2>

Now that you’ve determined your target audience, be sure your buyer persona includes the following:
<ul>
<li>Industry, specific job and responsibilities
</li><li>Demographics like gender, age and nationality
</li><li>Level of experience
</li><li>Preferred communication style, social media networks and content formats
</li><li>Types of questions they are asking, common objections and a typical buyer’s journey
</li></ul>
These are just a few examples of things you could include in your persona but not everything is going to be relevant. 

From here, you’ll need to gather data for your personas. They are fictional but data-based so you need to accurately reflect your audience. Gather data by digging into your analytics to learn about your audience’s demographics. Interview customers or send out surveys to gather data. Then, look for commonalities and use the info to create your data-based buyer persona. 

<h2>Are personas necessary? What’s the downside?</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Marketing-with-Personas.jpg" alt="Marketing with Personas" width="254" height="180" class="alignright size-full wp-image-8897" />Personas are great marketing tools and many find success with them. It’s a great way to target your contest to your audience with laser-focus rather than trying to reach a large crowd of different people and interests. It’s easier to find your users since you know what appeals to them. You can also use it to segment your readers and create more personalized content. 

With anything, there are some negatives to going this route. Those that don’t use personas avoid them because they are a bit time-consuming and expensive to produce. 

With the research involved to create an accurate persona, many don’t want to invest the time and money. Some don’t want to bring on a persona at the early stages of business marketing because you need time in the business to be able to work with a variety of clients. You need time to understand what will get results and what doesn’t after you’ve produced content. Plus, buyer personas will evolve just like your business will. 

You’ll likely benefit from a buyer persona if you already have a good idea of the specific audience you’re targeting, your blog has been active for a while and you already have plenty of customers and readers to gather the data you need. Otherwise, you may want to hold off if you’re just starting off, you don’t have a big client base yet and you’re completely sure who your target audience is yet. 

<h2>How to Use Them</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Blog-with-Personas.jpg" alt="Blog with Personas" width="254" height="180" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-8896" />Once you’ve decided to make a persona, you can use them for brainstorming blog post topics, writing posts, writing web content and building your blog audience. When you’re struggling to think of ideas, use your buyer persona for inspiration by reviewing your customer interviews to see what challenges and questions came up. Keep your persona in mind when writing any post and write as if you’re chatting with a specific person. 
 
This is a look at personas and how you can benefit from them in your business or blog. 



