How to Create Audience Personas for Inbound Marketing in Three Easy Steps (template included)

Creating Personas

Content and inbound marketing benefit greatly when marketers incorporate marketing personas into their strategy.

There are lots of resources online about creating inbound marketing personas. Smartbugmedia and HubSpot both have great resources for businesses, and while what I outline here will work at for-profit companies, I’m going to use a nonprofit organization as an example.

You may be asking, “if there are already so many great resources out there, David, why are you bothering to reinvent the wheel here?” The answer is: I’d like to put my spin on this, and also be able to have a page on my website that I can share on social media so that when people interact with this content, it’s earned traffic for my website. It’s something I recommend to clients as well when we talk about inbound and content marketing. If you want to learn more about how inbound and content marketing can work for your company or organization, feel free to contact me directly.

Step 1: Know (or Learn) Your Audience - And Use Data

If we were talking about a for-profit company, we’d say “know your customers.” Since we are using a nonprofit organization as an example, we’d say “know your donors” or “know the people you serve.”

What statistics provide an accurate overview of your typical donors? Your donors or supporters probably fit into multiple buckets. For example when examining your donor database or constituent management system, you may notice that a large percentage of your donations come from people who identify as females and are between 50 and 60 years old. You might find that your volunteers are between 30-40 years old and some zip codes are represented disproportionately high. 

You may understand your donors and supporters through regular interactions, and you may have an idea of who they are (demographically speaking) already, but reinforcing your theories by examining the data is a great idea. Who knows - the data may surprise you!

Step 2: Build 3-5 Characters

Now that you have done your research, you can mentally create a low-resolution image of your typical donors and begin to abstract a specific person that represents the predominant demographic characteristics of your donors.

Think about people you know that also embody these characters. It may help to look at Shutterstock or Getty Images to see different people’s faces, and begin to imagine one of those people as your persona - the fictional character that you are creating to serve as the representative of the amorphous group of donors that your research helped you create in step 1.

As if you were writing a movie or television show, write down what you are inventing about this character. It may help to use a template such as the one I’m linking to below: 

The template I use is a Google Doc - request access here to use it, or feel free to contact me directly.

Insert the image you found into the template. Give you persona a name, age, occupation, birthplace, and any other details that you feel are relevant.

Now think about your persona’s goals. What are they striving for in life? What is their north star? Include some secondary and tertiary goals, too. Now, how can your organization help them achieve those goals? What about obstacles? What roadblocks stand between your persona and their goals, and how can your organization help this person overcome these obstacles? 

After all of this is written down, circulate it with the other members of your team and get buy-in. In fact, you may want to involve them from the very beginning. After your team (and any necessary leaders) are on board with the personas, you are ready to begin using them.

Step 3: Generate Content For Your Personas

Let’s say the character you created is new to inbound and content marketing, they are wanting to create personas for their company. Maybe they work for a nonprofit organization. What type of content do you think they would like to find? What content would be helpful to them? Maybe a quick guide explaining inbound marketing personas would make for a great blog post - better yet, you could share your Google Doc template with them!

The type of content might depend on where you plan to share it, which would also be informed by the persona you have created it for. If you have created B2B content for an employee at a corporation, you may share a blog post hosted on your website on LinkedIn. If you are looking to sell a lifestyle clothing brand to members of generation z, maybe a video on TikTok would be better content to create.

Ideally, your content solves a problem for your persona, or gets them closer to one of their professional or personal goals.

After you create and share your content, keep an eye on your metrics to determine which pieces of content are performing the best, and create similar content in the future.