Six steps to reap full benefits of PPC in your business: Step 2

Create Customer Personas for a better Targeted PPC Campaign

A well-defined user-centered marketing plan is a key to a successful marketing campaign. And, a factor that lies beneath such a success is the creation of persona maps. In the digital marketing world too, PPC campaign requires creating persona maps, which clearly distinguish and define various sets of potential users of a service or a product. Having personas in hand will help you to understand your target audience better, which will enable you to create effective marketing campaigns and ad messages.

In PPC marketing, personas have widely been undervalued until recently. But now, experts round the world have started identifying persona maps as a crucial tool for effective PPC campaign. Completing the whole persona creation exercise for a business is useful for leveraging that information to create and manage new and existing marketing campaigns in digital space.

Getting Started

In order to create personas for your brand, you need to gather basic information about them. The core information of your target audience includes the following:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Job title
  • Job responsibilities

Going a step further, now you need to dive deeper into other relevant information about your persona. Here, include the following details:

    • Desires and needs
    • Income range and spending capacity
    • Life details
    • Highest level of education
    • User motivation

To start with, your persona should provide a brief sketch of each type of your buyer and should look something like this:

Gathering Information

Once you have come up with a persona profile template, best suited to your business needs, you need to figure out how to extract exact and reliable information for your each persona profile. For gathering information, you will need to research extensively and, many times, will have to use your common sense and informed guesswork in order to fill in the gaps.

If you have an already established business with a strong social-media presence, you will be able to find most of the information on online channels itself. Each social media has an analytics and/ or insights tool with which you can easily look into the details of the people who follow or like your page. For example, Facebook Insights tool provides “audience Insights that lets you learn about your target audience so that you can create more relevant content for them.” Another very powerful tool is Google Analytics which can help you “analyse millions of customer interactions through your website to reveal how different marketing channels affect online purchase decisions.”

If you want to have a better first-hand data about your target audience, survey is the best tool. Talk to your existing customers, let them fill feedback forms for you either in-store or online via survey tools like Survey Monkey.

If you do not have a well-established business, try looking at your competitors. Track their social-media accounts and see what kind of people follow or like their pages and with whom they have the maximum interaction with. These people are their target audience and probably, yours too, in future. For finding your competitors, use online competitive intelligence tools like Alexa and SimilarSites.


How to use Persona Profiles effectively

While you embark on the journey of paid digital marketing, that is, PPC, personas can be used to focus crucial decisions around the information you have gathered and summarised. For targeting the right type of audiences, use information in your persona maps in the following ways:

  • Most importantly, PPC experts can ensure right keywords are picked and used to attract right customers while running an Adwords campaign
  • Business people can evaluate business ideology, products, and offerings
  • Information architects can be well informed to develop new types of interface behaviours and wireframes
  • Web designers can modify the overall look and feel of the website
  • Copywriters can effectively tweak the content to appease appropriate audiences

Once you build your persona profiles, you will realise that you understand your target audiences better and can, thus, come up with a better targeted and effective plan for your PPC campaign. In the next step of this series, learn how to ascertain the right keywords your target audiences would be using the most to search for services or products similar to yours..

Ash Ganda

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