How Important are Personas in Influencer Marketing?

Influ­encer mar­ket­ing strate­gies involve researching and building a detailed database of crucial industry influencers, utilizing these channels to communicate the company’s message, and promoting quality 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 expansion stage port­fo­lio com­pa­nies generate 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 vital piece of the process.

With the port­fo­lio com­pany in ques­tion, we started right away holding planning sessions and discussing the inputs, channels, content types and the influencers we could target. Our con­ver­sa­tion soon stopped dead in its tracks; we had not, up until this point, discussed one of the most impor­tant com­po­nents to any strat­egy: our tar­gets. Who, exactly, are the targets of the influencer program? Who are our per­sonas?

A tar­get per­sona essentially is defined as 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 attributes amongst the group. These then turn into your goals, or your “people.”

In it, four dif­fer­ent types of per­sonas are delineated:

1. The pri­mary per­sona is the pri­mary user of the par­tic­u­lar inter­face or entire product.
2. The sec­ondary per­sona is another user of the pri­mary inter­face, one for whom we will make accom­mo­da­tions so long as there is no compromise as it relates to the primary persona’s experience.
3. The neg­a­tive per­sona represents 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 desire to go.
4. The buyer per­sona defines 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 ought to also construct a detailed, defined char­ac­ter from the infor­ma­tion you researched and compiled on your tar­get mar­ket (culled from the mar­ket research you’ve hope­fully executed).This entails assign­ing a name, age, socioe­co­nomic class, needs, pain-points, and more. Remem­ber: you must revise your personas on a regular basis. The mar­ket changes 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.” The communication process with your personas seems easier when you are viewing your product offerings through their eyes. Pain-point fea­tures receive the priority, super­flu­ous infor­ma­tion is cut, the value of your product now stands as the cen­ter­piece of stream­lined prod­uct mes­sag­ing, among other things. Craft your copy­writ­ing using their voice. If you developed your persona well, you should know how they act and speak.

Per­sona dis­cov­ery isn’t as effortless as it may seem— many pitfalls can arise that can stifle 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 that are the most applicable and important to your busi­ness. Per­sonas are about human­iz­ing your approach to need-fulfillment. These con­cepts are com­pli­men­tary, and they have mutu­ally exclu­sive principles—but they are definitely not iden­ti­cal.

With a solid sched­ule of revi­sions and a steady stream of updates, your newly devel­oped per­sonas will support your busi­ness grow and evolve. Per­sonas represent the back­bone of every successful influ­encer mar­ket­ing strat­egy; don’t start your endeav­ors with­out them!

Amanda Maksymiw is a Marketing Associate at OpenView Labs, responsible for content creation and strategy for OpenView and its portfolio companies.