LIMB – TARGET GROUPS – CREATING BUYER PERSONAS

Another concept commonly used in commercial marketing to facilitate communication and is easily translated beyond profit generating businesses, is creating buyer personas.

Think: Rachel – the cat lady, Mina – the millennial socialite or Bob The Builder. (I just made those up but you get the point😊 )

It’s like a typical character representing your target group – and creating buyer personas is a tool to humanize and simplify the potentially vague or formal concept of target groups.

Although fictional, these buyer personas are based on real data, behaviors, and demographics learned through previous experience, any type of interviews, polls and statistics. 

In the case of NGOs a more proper title would maybe be “user personas” or “interest personas” or maybe something else completely – better tailored to your specific needs, don’t get hung up on the formalities and names, the point is in the benefit which this concept brings.

So the final objective of the process is to know everything about your user persona; their role in their job and life, their likes and dislikes, their demographic and more.

This way you will better target your user persona and you will be able to find easier ways to communicate to them.

And you will have all this information in a very “reader friendly” format that will be easy to understand and use across the organization.

You are allowed and should have as many different user personas as target markets but be cautious as a user persona is not merely a description of your buyer/user. It’s point is in giving you marketing guidance, helping you understand the language you should use to succeed.

As they say a picture speaks a thousand word, so let’s continue with some user personas examples to get a feeling what we are talking about. As you will notice going through these examples, there are different ways to do it and different levels of detail. Use these for inspirational purposes but stay true to your needs and adapt them to serve your purpose.

The point is to have something that you can use for your communication goals and it should contain only information that can support and facilitate that. If the users income is irrelevant, by all means leave it out but make sure to dig into the specifics and authenticities of your users that may not seem big, but might be very differentiating. If your user for instance are only in one small part of your city, it doesn’t matter if it’s not a big territory you have to include it because it is what separates them from the rest.

In the next 4 examples first 2 ones are for B2C personas – similar to your NGO users and the second 2 are B2B personas which could be your donors.

• Use photos and quotes for quick reference and understanding of the key views of your persona
• Include all important characteristics but don’t overkill with miniscule details
• Spend time analyzing and deep diving, it will pay off in the next steps