A handy audience persona template to boost brand empathy and engagement

A good audience persona template can help you better define and empathize with your customer groups, and ultimately build better engagement. While one-on-one conversations between brand leaders and customers have their value, audience personas remain insightful, scalable tools. They’re great for building empathy, understanding, and genuine connection between brands and their customers. Over the past 15 years, audience personas have played a significant role in humanizing marketing, but how exactly?

Audience personas can increase your brand’s authenticity and consistency

Consider a fiction writer’s best practice of building character sketches. The author creates a framework for each character’s personality so they remain somewhat consistent from scene to scene. A character’s authenticity and consistency makes them feel more real to readers.

I recall the first time I saw audience personas while touring a highly respected, national health care organization’s marketing department in 2012. As soon as I set eyes on the wall of personas, I was drawn in by the thoughtfulness of marketing insight. Because I enjoy writing fiction on the side, I was encouraged by the detail of each audience group’s description. I scanned the snippets of audience motivators and challenges, proud that fellow marketers would pursue something so artful, so authentic. In that moment, I felt connected to the people in those personas, as well as the brand itself. With their audience personas outlined, brand employees and outside marketing support could create unified messaging for each audience group.

How to apply this audience persona template to your brand

Most brand organizations have an idea of which audience groups they would like to attract. However, they should be prepared to discover new audience types based upon brand strategy research.

Whenever possible, gather input for your brand’s audience personas from multiple sources. Include customer surveys, department leader input, social media and CRM data, industry research, and in-depth interviews with customers and vendors.

When collecting, sorting, and refining data for audience personas, brand marketing leadership should detail the customer’s perspective on these elements:

• Which defining attributes have the greatest commonalities to create an audience group or type (e.g. Millennials, B2B customers, avid athletes, empty nesters)
• Attributes and means relating to daily home life and career
• Goals, motivators and challenges within the home and work environments, according to each phase of the customer journey
• What a brand brings to the brand-customer relationship
• Relevant points of appreciation and engagement for a brand’s industry and specific product or service
• Which messaging markers and communication channels are most effective with an audience type, while still remaining on-brand

See these links for a variety of U.S. consumer research resources: Library of Congress and University of Southern California. 

Download the audience persona template here

I’ve provided a visual reference below, as well as a downloadable file to give you a head start on building your audience personas.

Download the Word file.

Be sure to create a manageable number of audience personas

Marketing industry opinions are inconsistent on how many audience personas a brand needs. However, two factors suggest limiting personas to ten or less.

• If audience personas humanize marketing through authentic, consistent connections, parallel that with the average human’s capacity to maintain up to six close friendships.
• Based on the average human’s working memory to process five to nine chunks of information at a time, five to nine audience personas seem manageable, per business unit.

After all, audience personas are about maintaining relationships; brands can’t be all things to all people.

So, while “Zoe” from the audience persona template above won’t reflect everyone in her audience group, she should be a thoughtful representation. Zoe doesn’t stay the same over the years either. A brand must stay in touch with her persona group. Customers can sense when brand representatives and leadership put a customer first. Building audience personas is an essential step forward.

Learn how audience personas fit into the an overall brand strategy, or hire me as a brand strategy consultant to guide you through the process.

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