What are Personas used for?

Marketing strives on buzzwords; one might conclude that personas are just another one. So why can personas help you build better marketing campaigns?

Do we really need personas?

What is easier and more promising? Writing a piece of content and putting it out through some arbitrary channels, without knowing who will be the recipient. OR write a piece of content tailor-made for a distinct group of persons, you pretty much know everything about, where they live, what they do for a living, why they are interested in your product, what their hobbies are, what jokes they get and like, how they look, and what their names are?

See, that's what personas are made for. They give your potential customers a face, a history, demands, and desires. They give you a person(a), you can talk to, a channel to reach them. Personas build empathy between you and your customers.

To put it more directly, personas in marketing can be used for:

1. Identifying customer needs and wants. Show them you have what they want.
2. Speak their language. Slang, emojis, and high-level language - Mirror the way your customers speak and refine your style towards their expected language.
3. Specific content: What topics do your customers care about? Tailor your content to their interests and stop trying to fit your customer to the content you already created.
4. Reach them where they are. You don't need a big marketing budget, and you don't try to hit someone with your message by accident. Tailor your content to deliver it through the channels your customers use.
5. Unify your marketing message. Large marketing teams seldom speak with one voice. Personas help you achieve this. If you center your communication around the personas, writers, graphic designers, sales team, seo, and SEA are sure to have the same audience in mind.
6. Tactical Advantage: Knowing what triggers your customers to buy gives you a strategic advantage. Utilize this knowledge to identify the crucial steps in the customer journey that are most important to your customers.

So, there are quite a few reasons behind the buzz, there might be something to personas in marketing after all.
If you think it through, how it might help to excel in your job, if you'd only know exactly who you're talking to, you surely will find a few more aspects of how personas can be used in marketing. The great thing is that buyer persona creation is no longer hard work, as it can be accomplished with a single click today, thanks to AI.