Understanding your audience is something every communications team strives to do. The way in which you communicate with an undergraduate college student is likely different than a freelancer with ten years experience, and different again from an executive with thirty years experience.

Personas overview

Creating Personas is a traditional marketing and product-development technique to uncover the attributes associated with key stakeholders of your message. These attributes include "head data" usually found in a database and "heart data" that goes more to their aspirational goals. For example, one Persona may strongly relate to "being able to leave the office by 5:00 pm every day" - that's what's important to them - whereas another cohort may yearn for challenging and stretching educational opportunities to help propel their professional development. Both are valid, both are different.

How detailed you get when creating Personas is up to you and your need. A Persona essentially becomes an avatar that represents a group of your audience. In Marketing Automation Professional, Personas are defined using various types of Target Groups, along with an accompanying narrative.

NOTE: This article explains the basics of how to create a Persona. If you need further assistance fleshing out the Personas appropriate for your organization, create a case.

Also note that some integrations will automatically create member types as Personas in the system.

Create a Persona

1. Access the Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Engagement > Personas.

3. Click Create.

4. In the resulting dialog:

1. Give the Persona a name.
2. Select an avatar image to represent the Persona.
3. Select the Target Group you want to represent the Persona (Target Groups represent the "head" data referenced earlier).
4. Provide a description, being sure to include some of the conceptual details of the Persona.
5. Click Update to create the Persona.

What next?

As new contacts appear, they'll automatically be added to the appropriate Persona. If a contact meets the criteria for more than one Persona, they'll be assigned to the first persona in the hierarchy, working from top to bottom. You can change the order (priority) of your Personas by clicking on their green tabs and dragging the persona to the desired position in the hierarchy.

Once a Persona has been created, it can be used in a multitude of ways.

• You could simply use it as the Target Group for certain messages; this enables you to use story-level targeting to really customize the content and the tone of that content for each specific demographic of the audience.
• Or you can use it to get an accurate idea of how each demographic of your audience is interacting with your messages.

View your Persona data

1. From the Admin interface, navigate to Contacts > Reports > Summary.

2. In both the Engagement Scoring and Lead Scoring folders, you can run several reports to view metrics for both your engagement and lead scoring based on your Personas.

By Persona

If you've created Engagement and/or Lead scoring, you can look at these metrics by Persona. The scoring grid provides a great visual representation of how each Persona is performing based on the metric you set. The darker the green square the larger the number of people in that grade for that Persona.

By Email Client

When you look at the scoring by Email Client, you can spot any email clients that seem to be under performing. If any are, you may want to do more testing to see if there is an issue with that particular client (e.g., deliverability issues, etc.). This report is helpful for detecting problems that may not be noticed otherwise.