What the heck is a persona?

You’ve surely heard this word thrown around a lot in the marketing world. And the word looks much like the word “personal” or “personality” and that’s essentially what it is. It’s an outline of the personal characteristics of your ideal customer — and therefore the target audience you are going after. I’ve seen personas that are very detailed and some that are more succinct. The degree of detail within your persona is directly determined by the type and amount of information/data you actually have on potential prospects.

A typical persona will take into account demographics like age, location, education, gender, income - as well as natural assumptions you’ve identified. However, if you’ve got access to more data — use it! And it’s perfectly normal to build out more than one persona (and, naturally, you will compose different sales copy that will speak to each.)

I recommend putting together a persona before writing sales copy. When you have flushed out a persona, it becomes much easier to identify the challenges, problems, perspectives and feelings of your prospect — and how your product/service can solve them.