11.4: Art of clarity - target audience member persona
- Page ID
- 286037
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When addressing any audience, it can help to have in mind a specific individual audience member as you are writing. Media organization from news to ad agencies to broadcast outlets have defined a target audience member or members for decades.
The term for this in most media fields is a “persona.” Crafting a target audience persona helps you better understand who your audience is and how to tailor your content to their needs.
This is a quick guide to help you create an audience persona, which is followed by a closely related assignment.
Creating a named target audience persona
Set goals
Before you start, clarify your purpose. If you’re in news, you may want to increase reader engagement. For advertising, you might be focused on converting audience interest into actual sales. In audiovisual production, you may aim to keep viewers watching until the end of your YouTube videos. Setting a goal will help you focus your descriptions and guide you in gathering essential information about your persona.
Gather data
A solid persona relies on real data. In a professional media organization, you might look to some or all of the following options:
- Audience analytics from your socials including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. These offer insights into viewer demographics, engagement, and preferences.
- Surveys and interviews involves directly asking your audience about their habits and preferences and gives you specific information.
- Industry trend reports detail audience behaviors in your field.
Define key segments
You’ll probably have more than one type of audience, especially if you’re creating content for mass audiences. You need to focus on a key segment for this exercise. For instance, a news outlet may have a younger audience following its social media accounts and an older audience reading news on its website. If you want to focus on encouraging your young audience to come to your website more often, it would make sense to build a persona representing a younger audience member.
Build a persona
Consider both demographic and psychographic information and create a detailed profile that includes the following:
Persona Name
Give your persona a name to make them feel real, for example, “Raven from Riverside.”
Demographics
Age Range
Identify “Raven’s” age as being at the middle of the demographic range you are trying to reach.
Location
Identify and describe the specific city, region or rural town where your persona lives.
Occupation
Identify your persona’s current job and career aspirations.
Income level, level of education, ethnicity
Only indicate these elements if relevant to the effort, but in some cases identifying these aspects of your persona can help you craft strategy and messages.
Psychographics
Values and Beliefs
Is this persona concerned about environmental issues, passionate about innovation, more interested in luxury? Explain what motivates them.
Lifestyle and Interests
Do they spend weekends reading, going to concerts, gaming, spending time with family?
Platform targets
Favorite media
Identify your persona’s favorite social media, video platforms, and apps. Are they more active on TikTok or YouTube?
Media length and type preferences: Do they prefer short-form video, photo content, i.e. Instagram, in-depth articles, live streams or some other form of media? You want to reach your target audience where they are and bring them to your media content and your media properties.
Motivations and challenges
Motivations
What is your persona hoping to get from your content? This could be staying informed, feeling inspired, or solving problems.
Challenges
What are your persona’s frustrations? Is she a busy student who needs quick news updates, an overworked barista who needs simple entertainment solutions after long and busy days at work?
Add a visual and a brief narrative
Once you have your persona you can use AI or an image search to come up with a photo that best represents what they would look like. Add to the photo a quick profile narrative using the following categories (and more, if warranted).
| Persona | Raven from Riverside |
| Age | 25 |
| Location | Suburban area in the Midwest |
| Occupation | Wait staff and part-time bartender as well as full-time college student |
| Values | Prizes professional development and staying informed but also wants to have a good time and not let her 20s pass her by. |
| Interests | Interested in music, hanging out with friend when she has the time, and life hacks to save time and money |
| Content Habits | Looks at TikTok and other social media several times a day, binge watches relatively high quality reality television |
| Motivations | Graduating college without a ton of debt while not missing out on a social life. She needs media options that inform conveniently |
| Challenges | Limited time, prefers concise, useful information, not "always on" social media |
Build content strategies around one or more personas
Once your personas are defined, use them to craft content that speaks to their needs. For news, this might mean creating brief, mobile-friendly stories for younger audiences. In advertising, you might design a campaign that targets eco-conscious consumers with messages about sustainability. In audiovisual production, it could involve creating videos that meet the preferred length and style of each persona.
Refine Your Personas Regularly
Personas should be allowed to grow and change just as real people do. Audience habits and values evolve over time. Revisit and update your personas regularly using fresh data from analytics or new surveys or qualitative interviews.
This assignment is to create a realistic persona representing a key target audience member who either follows news from your organization, buys products from a brand you represent, or views much of the audiovisual content you produce.
This persona needs a name, a photo, an age, and other key demographic and psychographic as needed.
Instructors will provide guidance about how much research to conduct and about how many of the seven tasks listed above you should complete.
The bare minimum persona should include
Name:
Age:
Location:
Occupation:
Values:
Interests:
Content Habits:
Motivations:
and
Challenges: