Persona mapping is the process of creating fictional yet realistic client profiles. Personal features, ambitions, motives, attitudes, and other factors are reflected in them.

Why should you utilise persona mapping?

Compared to traditional research and demographic methodologies, persona mapping provides a more in-depth understanding of our customers. It enables us to develop more personalised strategies, which improves the consumer experience.

So, where do we begin when it comes to persona mapping?

Begin with the fundamentals of demographics.

It’s critical to understand basic demographics like age, gender, occupation, and location. While we shouldn’t draw judgments about client personas based on demographics, they provide some preliminary data. The manner we contact clients to learn more personal information about them, for example, maybe influenced by their age. It can also assist us in generating the types of questions we wish to ask about these individuals. Surveys and a social media monitoring ORM platform can be used to discover such populations.

Persona mapping, however, does not end there!

Decide what data you’d like to understand about your customers.

The next stage is to pick what additional information to include in our persona mapping and how in-depth we can go. Remember that the more information you give us, the more comprehensive and personalised our service will be.

Consider the following instances of questions:

• How many hours do they put in per week?
• What kind of phone do they have?
• Is it true that they use social media? What are they going to do with it?
• What are the challenges they face in their job?
• What are their professional ambitions?
• What is a typical day in life?
• What are their priorities?
• What kind of purchasing experience does the buyer desire?
• There are several persona mapping templates available that include the questions we should be asking.

Look into it more.

Finding out more personal information about our consumers allows us to focus our communications far more effectively than relying on superficial assumptions like gender and age.

Media monitoring technologies can assist us in determining the themes of conversation, tone, and social networks with which our target audience engages. We may also find out more about the influencers that interact with our target audience, as well as what they read, discuss, and how they communicate. This might provide us with more information on the aspirations and lifestyles of our target audience. Using a combination of media monitoring, focus groups, and surveys, we should gain a good picture of our target market.

Track Competitors 

Tracking competitors to see whom they’re targeting helps us keep on top of the industry; knowing whom they’re targeting, for example, allows us to swiftly recognise new market opportunities or avoid wasting money on unproductive audiences. We can do so by looking at their blogs and social media. To whom do they address their letters? For example, blog posts like ‘How to Impress as a Marketing Intern’ are a dead giveaway about whom they’re aiming for.

As previously noted, we may utilise social media monitoring to learn about our competitors’ consumers’ positive and negative experiences — what are they criticising or raving about? We can better customise our customer experience approach to stand out against the competition by understanding more about our potential customers. As part of your persona mapping, include this.

Examine Traits

We can begin to categorise personality traits together once we have these details. Avoid reverting to a “basic” targeting strategy, such as collecting all of the “marketing managers, men, married/unmarried” together. We may develop several specific personas based on shared hobbies, lifestyles, and work functions using all of our gathered data. We can begin grouping attributes to build our personas by simply keeping a tally of recurring responses.

That ought to suffice to get you started with persona mapping. Keep in mind that personas must be changed frequently to stay current. If we have a clearer idea of whom we’re targeting, mapping content to each individual and their life cycle stage becomes a lot easier.