How can I use a persona for advertising?

Advertising is often considered to have four main functions: (a) targeting, i.e., selecting whom the marketing messages are sent to, (b) message creation, i.e., copywriting, which referes to creating ads and other marketing communications that are customized for the selected target group(s), (c) channel selection, i.e., deciding which mediums to use in order to reach the target group(s), and (d) reporting, i.e., analyzing the results of an advertising campaign.

When it comes to advertising, personas can help in all of the above advertising functions. For example, you can use personas in targeting, to select the customers who receive your company’s marketing messages. Moreover, personas can also be used for message creation – ideally, personas result in more personal ad copy texts that are resonating well with the target audience that the persona represents. Similarly, by knowing in which channels the persona most spends his or her time, you can choose the appropriate channels for advertising strategy.

Finally, you can report the results by persona, e.g., “Mary was the most recipient to our new campaign on Dinner in the Dark products, while David most enjoyed the Flight experience campaign”.

More articles on persona use cases

• How are Personas Used in Real Organizations?
• How to use a persona? 13 persona use cases listed
• How to Use Personas? Listing Typical Persona Use Cases
• How can I use a persona for online analytics?
• How can I use a persona for marketing?
• How can I use a persona for UX design?

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml