Define your personas and target market

Having a great story, a unique brand or an incredible design is wonderful. But unless you're sharing those with people who will want to hire you, your online energy is really a waste of time. When setting your online goals, it's important to include your ideal personas and markets. At my company, we track the titles and levels of people who hire us and group them into personas. A persona is a fictional description of a type of user. In our case, it's a client type that most often hires us or an employee type that comes to work for us. We want to understand these types better to develop content that appeals to them. We've come up with three main client personas: mid-to-high-level marketing clients, creative directors and design managers, and business owners. We determined this by creating a database of titles and then tagging them so we could group them together. We then gave each persona a name, a targeted age range, and what they are looking for when hiring a firm like us. In the beginning, we based these ideas on assumptions. But over the years, we have worked a variety of questions into our process to better understand more what our clients need, the pressure they face, and how we can meet those needs and alleviate those pressures. We also invite new clients to a followup meeting to get performance feedback. All this gives an idea of the kind of content each persona would want to see. We also highlight other brands they're interested in whether that's a link to a blog post about being organized or covering a certain capability. We try to work on a case study directly targeted to what they are most looking for in their creative partner or share links to other content that serves them directly. We have secondary personas as well. These include people we consider advocates and others we may want to work with. We include all of these personas in our comprehensive plan. I will tell you that defining personas is a lot of work, but it is hands down the best strategic move you can make. Using personas has allowed us to connect with so many more of our ideal clients and combined with the data we get from the various platforms, it continues to make us smarter. You can follow the same process when it comes to defining target markets. Where do you have the most success, can tell the best story, be the most profitable, and have the most fun? We had figured out that we had the most success when we work with companies who care about design and have a product to sell as well as mission-driven leaders or companies. This combined with the personas directly influences the types of projects we share and the content we develop. Personas and markets are the fuel for you to figure out content, platforms, timing, what works for your business and what doesn't. If you are a startup or just figuring these things out, looking at competitors, having conversations with past and current clients, and following the type of work you really want to do is a great place to start. No matter your level of success with developing your online community, personas and markets should be looked at regularly and expanded based on your company's strategy.