Creating Your Small Business Audience Persona

After your in-depth research to identify your small business audience persona, creating it is the next logical step.

What is audience avatar?

Your audience avatar is a description of the characteristics of your ideal customers . As a business owner, you have a good idea of your ideal customer. You have identified her/his traits and are confident of aligning your marketing messaging to attract the right audience.

Below is a helpful template to get you started on creating your typical customer persona. Fill in using fictional values where required (especially Personally Identifiable Information – PII)

Audience Avatar Template

Complete the profile to the fullest extent possible. Add a photo so you can put a face to the name. Having a filled in profile will help you create content that aligns perfectly with the persona in question.

Although you may have not all the answers, with all the hard work you have put into your research so far, you can make your persona as representative as your actual target audience.

Some of the other questions you can consider when creating your persona include

• • List of countries your customers reside in
  • If you are a local business, the cities in which you offer services
  • Where your customers are now – websites they visit, blogs they read – so you can get an idea of the content they consume
  • What are they thinking – the keywords or search phrases they use to search for products/services that your business sells
  • Who your competitors are – consider at least 3 of them especially those that are doing a great job of marketing online
  • The topics that educate and inform your buyers
  • The topics and/or competitors to avoid

Finding your customer persona

Your web analytics should give you a good insight into audience demographics. Research the sources of traffic of visitors to your site, especially those from social media.

If you feel lost, bite the bullet and have a pop up survey when visitors try to exit your site (clicking on address bar, hitting the back button or closing the browser). Ask them about their experience and what they would like to see on the site.

An accurate persona is very helpful in attracting the right audience to your site. If you find site visitors bouncing off immediately or average time on site is abysmally low, then your persona definition is suspect. It is time to go back to the drawing board and take a hard look at your persona description.

It is very crucial to get the persona of your business audience as accurately as you can. At Traffic Alignment, this is what we do best. Let us do the hard work of creating the persona for your small business audience so you can focus on growing your business. Drop us a line.