The Importance of Personas in Influencer Marketing

Editor’s note: Influencer marketing strategies involve researching and building a database of key influencers, communicating the company’s message through these channels, and fostering relationships. If you want to learn more about delving into influencer marketing yourself, here is a guide to getting started.

We recently helped one of our portfolio companies develop an influence marketing strategy – a powerful and innovative approach that reaps amazing results. But before you do, take a lesson from our recent endeavor: you may be misunderstanding a crucial piece of the process.

Who Are Your Target Personas?

With the portfolio company in question, we jumped right into the planning session with a discussion about the inputs, content types, channels, and possible influencers to target. Our conversation soon stopped dead in its tracks; we hadn’t 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?

A target persona is essentially an amalgam of characteristics representative of a market. Since your product or service can’t appeal to everybody (as much as you’d like it to), you take a group of them—a target segment—and identify common traits amongst the group. These then become your goals, or your “people.”

How to Develop Target Personas

Pragmatic Marketing has an in-depth whitepaper on personas and persona development.
In it, four different types of personas are delineated:

• The primary persona is the primary user of the particular interface or entire product.
• The secondary persona is another user of the primary interface, one for whom we will make accommodations so long as the primary persona’s experience is not compromised.
• The negative persona is the user for whom we explicitly will not add product features or capabilities because to do so will pull our product in a direction we do not want to go.
• The buyer persona is the buyer (either an extension of an existing persona or a non-user) whose biases and needs must be addressed in the product and/or the marketing material.

You must also build a detailed, defined character from the information you have on your target market (culled from the market research you’ve hopefully executed). This means assigning a name, age, socioeconomic class, needs, pain points, and more.

Remember: personas need to be revised on a very regular basis. The market fluctuates radically and often, and so do people and their tastes. Assuming that a one-time demarcation of your personas exonerates you from having to do it again is a surefire way to misunderstand your ever-changing targets.

Now you’re playing with “the power of the persona.” Communicating with your personas becomes easier when you’re looking at your product and product plan through their eyes. Pain point features are prioritized, superfluous information is cut, your product’s value becomes the centerpiece of streamlined product messaging, among other things. Craft your copywriting using their voice. If your persona is well developed, you should know how they act and speak.

Beware Persona Development Pitfalls

Persona discovery isn’t as easy as it may appear – there are many pitfalls that can hobble your progress. The biggest and most common mistake in crafting personas is confusing the concept with market segmentation. Market segmentation is about dividing your market into subgroups most pertinent to your business. Personas are about humanizing your approach to need-fulfillment. These concepts are complimentary, and they have mutually exclusive principles—but are not identical.

With a solid schedule of revisions and a constant stream of updates, your newly developed personas will help your business grow and evolve. Personas are the backbone of an influencer marketing strategy; don’t start your endeavors without them!