Define your personas

A practical guide to understanding the nature and value of personas, and how to identify your target audiences to develop effective marketing strategies.

1. The persona: What is it?

Personas are fictional representations of the audiences you want to reach with your media. They are the users or customers of your project. They take the form of typical profiles that outline certain characteristics such as age, gender, place of residence, socioeconomic status, preferred times and platforms for consuming information, media currently consumed, and so on.

Above all, personas are defined based on their needs and habits: the challenges they face, whether personal or professional; and the platforms or media they use on a daily basis to stay informed, be entertained, communicate, or work—whether online or offline.

2. Why define personas?

No persona, no business model

Defining your personas with precision and care is a fundamental element in building a media project. Indeed, personas allow you to clearly identify who you are addressing. Each persona is defined to represent a typical segment of the audiences you wish to reach, with their specific characteristics, needs, usage patterns, and financial means.

By identifying the target segments and audiences you define and study, you can reorient your media project, evolve its editorial content, economic model, pricing, or even its formats and distribution channels. Properly identifying your audiences' needs through personas means clearly defining the editorial and commercial proposition you're making to them.

Finally, personas **must be at the heart of communication and marketing strategies, since it is based on them that these strategies can be developed, refined, and tailored to the specific distribution channels, the appropriate tone, and the levers that drive audience engagement, conversion, and retention over the long term.**

To address everyone is to address no one

If some media outlets seem to address everyone and be "mainstream," it's only because they reach multiple personas, meet multiple needs, and cover different topics/verticals. A persona thus represents a segment of these audiences, one with its own specific characteristics.

It's therefore not entirely fair to assume that you need to reach 'everyone' and that your media should appeal to the broadest audience. Instead, start by identifying the core of your target audience—one or two personas, to begin with. Growth and any eventual expansion of your audience range will happen gradually, in parallel with the development of your media and its offerings.

Putting Your Personas to the Test

Once your targets are identified and personas are created, it's essential to validate them against real-world conditions and your actual experience: qualitative interviews, quantitative data, audience research. Personas serve as the foundation for your strategy but work hand in hand with direct engagement with your community. To help refine these audience definitions, it's recommended to conduct an annual audience study.

Moreover, these typical audience personas are useful throughout your project and should be updated regularly (once a year) to verify the relevance of your editorial proposition and your communication and marketing strategies in relation to your audiences, their usage patterns, and their needs.

Finally, work on personas complements work on the canvas, which is a vision of your project as a whole, and in particular your business model. The two work together.

Start with real audiences

To identify your personas and build their profiles, you need to be observant and pragmatic, but also conduct research and study existing practices, usage patterns, and sociological profiles. Indeed, your personas will be based on both:

1. By drawing on people in your circle whom you imagine using your media: in fact, among the people around you—whether close friends or acquaintances—you can identify those who, in various ways, resemble your target audience. You can therefore draw inspiration from the personalities, habits, or needs of people you know and associate with your project’s target audiences to enrich your personas **and make them more realistic.

2. Stereotypes and exaggerated personality and/or consumption traits: A persona is not intended to provide a nuanced and unique psychological portrait, but rather to define marketing segments based on various measurable criteria. In this sense, personas are archetypal portraits that border on stereotypes in certain respects.

3. Insights from sociology: From reception studies to media sociology, and from audience behaviors and usage patterns, sociology is full of enlightening studies and analyses that can guide you and inform the definition of your personas.

Having guided many projects through this stage, we want to reassure you: it’s normal if this step seems difficult to you! Especially if you don’t have a background in marketing—creating personas is often a complex process.

3. Create your personas

Step 1 — Ask yourself what problem(s) you want to address

This step will help you define who you want to target and why (what value you're bringing to them). What problems? What needs? What benefits?

You must be able to define an essential need. If you're not essential to your audience, someone else will be in your place. The need you're addressing must align with your vision, the mission you're pursuing, the overall

Step 2 — Start with identified or identifiable profiles and use cases

Once you've identified the problems of your potential targets, you'll be able to conduct some preliminary research. Start by examining your own beliefs, what you've been able to observe around you and in the ecosystem.

Next, it will be crucial to delve into audience, usage, and sociological studies related to your topics, media, themes, and business models.

Step 3 — Define your core target audience—the people for whom you are indispensable

When considering the people you want to reach, think about the differences in customs, needs, and practices that may exist so that you can get an idea of the different categories that might exist within your target audience.

From there, focus your selection on the core of your audiences—the people you’d like to reach first. You can identify one to three different profiles of people who make up your priority audiences.

The primary persona represents your core target audience—the first 100 or 1,000 fans of your project, the people who truly need what your project offers. Don’t see a third persona yet? It’s better to have a single, well-defined target audience than a scattered one.

Step 4 — Create a profile of your target audience

Take the time to reflect, look around you, read, and do your research to gain a clear understanding of what these people need, how they operate, their budget, and their preferred formats and media.

• Age: the average age you estimate for the person, and the age group to which they belong;
• Gender: the gender (female, male, non-binary) that will be predominantly represented;
• Place of residence: a village? In a big city? House? Apartment? Shared apartment? ;
• Socio-occupational status: socio-occupational category, occupation, currently employed or not;
• Financial resources: average income, average amount spent on culture/information, ease of access to online payment or lack thereof;
• Preferred times and frequencies for consuming information: Usually in the morning before breakfast? On Sunday mornings over coffee? On Tuesday evenings on the subway? On Thursday at lunchtime while riding a bike? For 15 minutes? For 1 hour? ;
• Devices through which a person consumes information (smartphone, tablet, radio, television, magazine, etc.*.*), which may or may not align with their needs and usage patterns;
• Competitive environment/media consumed: examples of media or services that the person consumes or uses, and that are currently beneficial to them;
• Social media and offline networks: Where does this target audience currently spend its time? Whether online or offline. (Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.; nonprofit organizations, sports clubs, etc.);
• Problems Encountered and Needs Identified: What problem(s) does your target audience face on a daily basis? What need(s) have you identified—whether professional or personal? This step is key; it’s this answer that makes you indispensable and will determine your target audience’s ability to pay for your project, either directly or indirectly.

4. Our Educational Resource

The Médianes team has prepared a handy document to help you apply the lessons from this fact sheet to your own project.

5. Learn More

• Want to expand your audience? Here are three questions to ask yourself before getting started.
• About your project’s identity: Check out our guide on value propositions, as well as editorial and visual guidelines.
• On defining a marketing strategy: Check out our practical guide to aligning your personas with your value proposition and business model, including how to create a canvas.