Who are your Personas?

It is getting closer and closer to the end of 2009, meaning it is time to plan for 2010. As part of our business development services, we have been assisting our expansion stage companies develop sales and marketing strategies. Most recently, we helped one of our portfolio companies develop an influence marketing strategy for the new year.

We started the planning session with a discussion about the inputs, content types, channels, and possible influencers to target. Our conversation was quickly halted due to the fact that we had not discussed one of the most important components to any strategy — our targets. Who, exactly, are we targeting with the influencer program? Who are our personas?

Personas are commonly used in marketing and product management. According to Pragmatic
Marketing, personas are sample users to represent needs, wants, and skills
of your real users. By diving right into the technical planning of what content we wanted to deliver and how, we were looking past an essential component to the program. In the end, we decided that the company’s first action item involved working with product management to develop two to three personas for the influencer program.

If you need some help on creating personas, check out Pragmatic Marketing’s case study.