Audience Personas: The Key to a Successful Targeted Ad Campaign

If you ask any person on the street who their favorite artist is, you’ll likely get a different answer every time. So, why would you market your product to everyone the same way? Knowing your audience and identifying the person who will love your product is the key to a successful ad campaign.

That’s where audience personas come in. They serve as roadmaps to successfully market to your ideal consumer. They can help narrow down your audience and ditch customer generalizations.

Audience personas provide the secret recipe for who will love your product the most. If you want to guarantee a successful ad campaign, keep reading to learn why they’re important for your business and how you can successfully identify and build them.

What Is an Audience Persona?

An audience persona is a fictional characterization of a group of people within your target audience. It visualizes a “person” with a list of characteristics to help businesses better focus their marketing campaigns on a specific group of people.

The difference between an audience persona and a target audience is that your target audience will be a much broader group of people who share demographics and behaviors. Conversely, an audience persona represents a group of people within your target audience. They’re the north star for your marketing efforts, so you learn exactly who will benefit from your product the most.

Why Should You Create an Audience Persona?

Audience personas keep your eyes on the prize. They help your business better understand your consumers’ pain points so you can position yourself as the solution.

They Improve Marketing Strategies

When you create an audience persona, you’re no longer shooting in the dark. Knowing your buyer’s motivations and behaviors can help you craft better messaging and drive engagement. Tailoring your marketing approach helps you thoughtfully reach your target customers and inspire action from them.

They Influence Product Development

Identifying audience personas puts you in a learning mindset to receive customer insights. Any information you can gather about your customers can help you develop a better product. You’ll tap into your customers’ preferences and pain points so you can thoughtfully align with them.

They Help You Develop Better Content

Your audience personas can help you focus your creative efforts and develop better content for your business. Your advertisements should resonate with your customers and reach them at the ideal time.

If you use audio advertising for your business, you understand that music and podcasts can act as companions for your listeners’ daily activities. We listen to our favorite types of audio while we drink our morning coffee, exercise, and commute home from work in the evenings. Brands can create advertising messages that match their customers’ activities, like a workout app reaching a runner during their after-work run.

They Offer Testing Opportunities

With multiple personas, you can test out different marketing campaigns and content to see what resonates with each persona. You can test campaigns against your personas, do A/B testing, compare platforms, and see if any brand partnerships test better than others. There are countless testing opportunities to get to know your customers better.

How Many Audience Personas Are Necessary for My Business?

Don’t go overboard on creating too many audience personas, but don’t lack imagination, either. Try to stick to two to three, and stay away from anything above six. Prioritize a few different ones to make the most impact and clearly identify the best person for your product.

Useful Tips for Getting Started

Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of creating audience personas that are effective, complete, and insightful to your marketing efforts.

1. Study Your Existing Customers

Learn from the customers already engaging with your brand. The more you research your actual customer base, the less guesswork and stereotyping you’ll do. 

Study your customers during the sales process. Which products do they value the most? What time of month are they making purchases? You can also create a customer checkout survey to gather data.

It’s also important to interact with your customers. What kind of content do they engage with the most? How does your audience spend their time? Try to observe and identify any patterns in behaviors.

2. Learn From Your Customers' Pain Points

Understanding your customers' human side is one of the biggest keys to your campaign’s success. What are your customers’ fears? Is it finance? Is it success in their professional life?

Any chance to get personal will help you better reach your customer base. You can collect this data through customer surveys, online reviews, customer service communication, and digital interaction.

Plus, what causes friction in your customers' sales process? Is there anything frustrating about the product or check-out process? It’s important to identify and solve these pain points.

Finally, what does your audience want to achieve? Learning about your customer’s goals and barriers to success can position your business as the solution they need.

3. Make Your Audience Personas Realistic

Remember that these personas represent real customers and real people, so try to stay away from incomplete stereotypes. After you’ve gathered enough information and details about your personas–flesh them out even further. Give them a name, perhaps a catchphrase, and other details to bring them to life.

Connecting with Your Audience Through Audio Advertising

Audio advertising may be the secret sauce in your marketing campaign to successfully reach your audience. People spend over four hours of their day listening to audio, and a majority say that audio ads are easier to retain than visual ads.

At SiriusXM Media, we use different tools to better understand your brand’s audience, so your advertisements don’t fall on deaf ears. For example, we can use first-party data with streaming audio to learn about audiences’ behavior, including what devices they listen on, what time of day, and what content engages them the most. And for podcasts, we offer contextual solutions and Predictive Audiences to target podcast episodes that will resonate with your audience the most.

Remember that your audience doesn't passively engage with content. They’re always active, whether it’s pressing play or choosing their favorite workout hype playlist. By fleshing out your audience personas, you’ll better understand how to align with their daily activities.

Audience personas remind you to create better content that actually gets through to the right consumer. If you begin with your customers in mind, you’ll end up with a strategic and successful marketing campaign.

Once you have your ideal audience persona hammered down, it’s time to choose a partner that will help you connect with the consumers you’re after. That’s us—let’s talk.