How to Use Marketing Personas to Boost Sales 

Single male, 40, successful business owner, seeks working female, enjoys an active lifestyle and dressing trendy. 

No, it’s not a classifieds ad (do those still exist?!), it’s a marketing persona for the athleisure company Fabletics.

Don’t know what a marketing persona is? Don’t worry.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at this useful marketing tool. We’ll discuss why it’s important, how to create a marketing persona and the benefits of using one. 

Ready to sell more stuff?

We thought so. Let’s get started!

What is a Marketing Persona, and Why Do They Matter for eCommerce?

A marketing persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

Picture your ideal customer – now take the time to write down everything about who they are and what they do. That’s a marketing persona.

Marketing personas typically include basic demographic information such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Salary and income
• Location
• Education
• Family

In addition, you should include personal information such as their key goals and the obstacles that prevent them from achieving their goals – this can help you develop more effective marketing materials.

How Do I Make A Marketing Persona? How To Find The Demographic Information You Need 

To create a marketing persona, you need to gather insights about your current – and desired – customers. Here are a few ways to do this.

• Website analytics – Website analytics are the cornerstone of eCommerce marketing personas. If you incorporate Google Analytics into your Magento installation, you’ll be able to easily capture basic information like the age, gender and location of website visitors, as well as “affinity categories” that help you identify their interests.
  

• Capture user data – Allowing and encouraging users to create profiles on your store is a good way to capture their data.

• Social media research – You can conduct research using your social media presence, and run giveaways or other special promotions in exchange for customer information. You can also monitor social networks for mentions of your brand, and learn more about who’s talking about you.

• Customer service interactions – Whether you have a customer service team or you handle customer service requests on your own, you can use these interactions to inform your marketing personas.
• Post-purchase surveys – Asking customers to provide information about themselves on a post-purchase survey is a good way to gather demographic information. Consider offering a coupon or discount on future purchases to encourage participation.

Once you’ve gathered enough data, you can create a marketing persona for each of your customers. We’ll go over an example persona below.

An Example Marketing Persona – Meet Busy Bob! 

We prefer to show, not tell. So let’s give you an example of a marketing persona. Let’s say you’re running an online store selling fitness equipment like jump ropes, pull-up bars, yoga mats, and so on.

Who should you market to? Using information gathered from your website and other sources, you find out that most of your customers and website visitors have the following attributes, and you can develop a marketing persona. Let’s call him Busy Bob.

• Age – 25-34

• Gender – Male 

• Salary and income – $50,000/year

• Location – Urban, United States

• Education – Bachelor’s degree
• Family – Married with a child 

Busy Bob’s goal is to improve his overall level of fitness. However, he has a few obstacles that are getting in the way. He’s short on time, since he has a professional career and has a child – likely a young child, given his age range. And he may also not have worked out in a while, so he’s not sure how to get started.

So, how can you advertise your services to Busy Bob? Maybe you could put together a 30-day guide to improving your overall level of fitness, and offer it for free with an email signup at your store. 

Or, you could create an article that puts together a list of workouts that take 30 minutes or less – and include some of the equipment you sell on your store as suggested products. 

By simply looking at your demographic information and putting together a marketing persona, then thinking through the goals and obstacles that face that persona, you can develop insights that will help you develop a much more effective marketing strategy. 

The Benefits Of Creating Marketing Personas for Your Online Store

Wondering why you should go through the effort of developing marketing personas? Here are just a few of the benefits that you’ll enjoy if you invest the time and energy into creating marketing personas.

• Get to know your customers – You might know who your customers are in an abstract sense. But until you put “faces” to the names, you may not think very deeply about who they really are – where they’re from, what their goals and obstacles are, and other such things.
  By honing in on the specifics about your customers, you’ll be able to develop a deeper understanding of what they’re looking for when shopping on your site – and you can tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Know how to market your products – The process of creating marketing personas helps you understand how to market your products more effectively.
  Using our above example of Busy Bob, we know that he’s short on time, and looking to get back in shape fast, even though he hasn’t worked out much recently. That information can be used to develop very effective advertisements, written content, video content, and so much more – and it can even be used to help you pick out the right extensions. 
• Segmented marketing campaigns – Chances are, you don’t just have a single type of customer. Creating multiple personas for every type of customer allows you to curate segmented marketing campaigns that target each type of customer individually, which is very powerful. A study from Braze found that segmented marketing campaigns have an ROI that’s up to 200% higher than traditional, one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns.
• Enhance overall marketing efficiency – Finally and perhaps most importantly, marketing personas help you do more with less. By taking the time to break down the basics about who’s really shopping on your site and understanding the different users buying your products, you can target each individual with greater precision. 

For these reasons – and quite a few more – taking the time to create marketing personas for your site is definitely worth the investment. 

Get started today, and see how your store can boost sales by using informed, specific marketing personas.

Know Why Marketing Personas Are Important – And Start Using Them Today! 

We hope this guide has been informative and helped you learn a bit more about marketing personas. At 121eCommerce, we specialize in Magento website development, and it’s our goal to empower entrepreneurs and small business owners with the tools they need to succeed.

So take the lessons you’ve learned in this guide – and start building your own buyer personas. Looking for more tips about running your Magento store? Check out our blog, and you can learn more about Magento marketing, administration, design, and so much more.