Basically, a persona is a fictional character created based on real data about a company's customers. It works as a strategy to better understand how to deal with the public, what decisions to make and how to interact with them, considering their characteristics, behavior and needs.

To create a persona, a lot of research and analysis is needed, so the persona is based on data, not the marketing team's assumptions. Here are some steps that should be taken:

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• Conduct user surveys to collect relevant information;
• Ask all the important questions;

• What are their dreams?
• What are their pains?

• Analyze and study the collected data; and
• Build your persona and share it with your team.

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Here are some examples of questions according to specific goals:

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According to an interview conducted by ITSMA, 90% of the companies that use personas claim to understand their audience well.

Source: ITSMA

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Creating a persona brings many benefits to your business, such as getting to know your audience better and what their relationship is like with what you are offering – whether a product or a service –, knowing how to choose the best channels to communicate with your audience, being able to create the ideal tone of voice for your company and developing interesting content to share with them.

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While a persona is more specific, the target audience is a general and more generic definition of consumers, based on segmenting people considering selected characteristics, such as age, country of origin and gender, and could have differences related where to use the information, for example:

• Persona → To develop products and experiences
• Target audience → To create campaigns and customer list

‍EICOM Institute also recommends that you take a look at this study from Harvard to learn more.