20 Defining Personas

Definition

A persona is a fictional person who represents your target consumer, including their needs, thoughts, and goals. It helps prevent organizations from generalizing all users into one bucket and assuming everyone has the same needs and goals.

For non-profit organizations, your target audience is made up of donors, activists, non-profits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, web publishers, and video producers.

Why is it important?

Developing a persona allows marketers to make more personalized content that helps their audience relate better with the marketing campaign (League, 2019). This includes making more effective call-to-actions, social media content, landing pages, and email messages (Haydon, 2013).

Usability.gov, a leading resource for guidelines and best practices in user experience online, says the purpose of personas is to “create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference” (Usability, n.d).

To be successful in marketing, it is crucial to have a better understanding of your customers and see your business through their eyes. “Being able to think and behave like your customers is the key to being able to communicate with them effectively (Parsons, 2020).” Understanding your customers helps solve problems and gaps the business may be seeing. Personas give you valuable insights that can help you improve your strategies and content (Linde, 2019). Ultimately, having personas will help you make decisions about the way you run your business! From the way you design your website to choosing what platforms to market your business on.