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Communications > Personas

Persona development

Understand who your audience really is, and what they really want

What is persona development, and why is it important?

The audience you’re trying to reach is not one audience – it’s a diverse mix of people with different motivations, ambitions, needs and challenges. Based on quantitative research, persona development will help you segment your audience into key groups. It also enables you to speak to each group with tailored campaigns and communications.

What is persona development, and why is it important?

The audience you’re trying to reach is not one audience – it’s a diverse mix of people with different motivations, ambitions, needs and challenges. Based on quantitative research, persona development will help you segment your audience into key groups. It also enables you to speak to each group with tailored campaigns and communications.

The benefits of persona development

  • A better understanding of who your audience is and what they want.
  • Smarter choices in terms of marketing strategies, campaign messaging and wider organisational decisions.
  • Tailored, persuasive messaging for different groups.
  • Communications that connect more strongly and deliver a greater impact.

Our approach:

We have a proven yet flexible methodology when it comes to developing personas. Here are the key steps that tend to be involved.

Step one

Making the right start

We’ll meet with the core stakeholders to agree on the project’s aims and deliverables. We’ll also review any existing research and insight you may have.

 

 

Step two

Getting the big picture

We’ll design and build an online survey to help us understand things like demographics, interests, motivations, influencers, attitudes and media use.

 

Step three

Cluster analysis

Scrutinising the data, we’ll run clustering models to identify distinct groups within your audiences.

Step four

Developing your personas

This is where we bring the data to life. We’ll work collaboratively to build and share a set of personas, complete with the audience attributes that will provide the most value.


 

Step five

Report and delivery

We’ll create a report featuring all the data and your finalised personas, and deliver it in a workshop with your stakeholders. We can support with putting the personas into action, too.

Meet our experts:

Vicky Conroy

Vicky Conroy

As Consultancy and Insight Lead, Vicky leads our team of 15 consultants and strategists with expertise in areas including marketing, brand, creative, market research and data science. As a Higher Education specialist, Vicky delivers and implements effective and innovative strategic solutions to overcome marketing and recruitment challenges for our university clients.

Ed Layt

Ed Layt

Leading a team of 15 consultants and strategists, Ed has a deep understanding of both the challenges of the education marketplace as well as the realities of working within an institution. With over 18 years of education experience, he’s delivering marketing consultancy projects with more than 100 further and higher education institutions.

Aimee Kleinman

Aimee Kleinman

Aimee has more than 15 years’ marketing, communications and student recruitment experience in higher education, having previously worked for a number of universities, leading the development of UK and international recruitment strategies. As a Lead Marketing Consultant, her areas of expertise are brand positioning and international recruitment strategy.

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