Persona Development – Target audience characterization close to the real customer
A developed persona serves as a representative for the purchasing habits of your target audience. We create such a virtual example person with the analyzed data collections and add possible behavioral scenarios. This way, you can identify improvement potential for your online shop and strategically place new marketing campaigns with a broad reach and low dispersion in your market segment using the “What if” principle.
Persona development for digital strategies by Hob by Horse
For persona development, you consolidate the data from your target audience analysis into bundles of characteristics. From the values with the highest and lowest metrics, a theoretical customer character emerges with habits, skepticism, emotional expectations, and targeted purchasing behavior. Such a virtual ideal customer is then helpful in building strategically meaningful content marketing, SEO components, or paid media.
Key Stages of Persona Development
Four pillars characterize Hob by Horse’s persona development, tailored individually for your online shop:
- Define objectives: Do you want more clicks on your display ads or increased engagement with your landing page? Is the focus on the presence with services, or is product sales essential? Depending on the strategic goal, the selected persona has demographic characteristics such as daily life, lifestyle, and life demands. With a fictitious name, a carefully chosen life quote, and an assigned image, it becomes a virtual person who might act in a certain way or differently.
- Data collection for the persona: The more sources you use for data collection, the more concrete the characterization forms. Valuable analysis sources include, for example, Google Analytics, Google Ads, social media followers, and newsletter subscribers.
- Summarize data in a structured manner: Now we form customer groups from the collected data, such as stressed young professionals or long-established nature enthusiasts in the older age group. The more data attributes that can be assigned to each group, the more precisely you can tailor future marketing campaigns to the customer.
- Create a sedcard for the persona: Fill out the sedcard following a top ten principle (demographic data, name, image, personally typical information, behavior when searching for and in online shops). In tailoring to your business model, we determine which websites the persona prefers, how actively they engage on social media distribution channels, and how much interest they show in news and current events.
Your campaigns will be more successful the more you adhere to this rule:
»When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.« (© Meredith Hill)
Industry Utilization
Industry Relevance of Persona Development
In terms of industry orientation, persona development is a veritable playground. Fashion enthusiasts and trendsetters in the lifestyle industry often change their search habits and personal interests quite frequently. E-commerce customers in the automotive or packaging industry are more focused on bare facts and tend to stay loyal to their themes for long periods. The hospitality and gastronomy industry is also subject to constant changes in search behavior and interests. Expectations for services from insurers and in the real estate industry also change with constantly evolving offerings. If your business model currently occupies a small market niche, you can use the persona in this specific segment for strategic website development and dynamic content close to the audience.
Target audience benefits with persona concretization by Hob by Horse
Your target audiences, whether B2B, B2C, or D2C, will not miss the fact that your online shop can practically anticipate every search request from the moment they start typing. The shopping experience improves through strategic navigation options, active calls to action, and inviting marketing campaigns. The shopping experience improves through strategic navigation options, active calls to action, and inviting marketing campaigns. Additionally, you benefit from word-of-mouth marketing in forums and social media distribution channels.
You want to enhance the strategy of your online shop with persona development? Hob by Horse is happy to provide telephone consultations and promptly responds to your inquiries via email!
