Creating a Customer Persona:
Best Practices for Effective Event Marketing

When designing event experiences, understanding your audience is a critical element of an effective event strategy. One of the best ways to do this is by creating a customer persona, also known as an audience persona, buyer persona, or marketing persona. A customer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on data and insights about your target audience. By creating a customer persona, you can better understand your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, and tailor experiential marketing efforts accordingly. In B2B event marketing, it’s important to go beyond the typical role and title. “Decision Maker” is not a Persona. “CxO” is not a persona. Event marketers should address their target audiences a human beings; people with multidimensional personalities, diverse interests, thoughts, and emotions.

Here are some best practices for creating an effective customer persona:

1. Start with research: The first step in creating a customer persona is to gather data and insights about your target audience. This can include demographic information, such as age, gender, and location, as well as psychographic information, such as interests, values, and behaviors. You can also examine techno-graphics, or media consumption habits. You can collect this data through surveys, interviews, social media analytics, observations of their environment and behaviors, and other sources. Observe and measure their actions and behaviors at events. Which events do they attend? Why? How to they respond to promotions? Are they networkers, session participants, or exhibition dwellers? How do they typically engage?

According to a study by HubSpot, companies that conduct customer research are 466% more likely to be successful in their marketing efforts. This highlights the importance of starting with research when creating a customer persona.

2. Identify key characteristics: Once you have gathered data about your target audience, you can start to identify key characteristics that define your ideal customer. This can include things like their goals, pain points, purchasing habits, engagement behaviors, and communication preferences. By identifying these characteristics, you can create a more accurate and detailed customer persona.
3. Give your customer persona a name and backstory: To make your customer persona feel more real, give them a name and a backstory. This can include information about their job, family, hobbies, work environment, relationships, and more. By creating a relatable persona, you can better understand their needs and motivations.
4. Use visuals: To bring your customer persona to life, use visuals like photos, videos, or illustrations. This can help you and your team visualize your ideal customer and make them feel more tangible. Be sure to consider their demographics here.
5. Use your persona to inform your event marketing efforts: Once you have created a customer persona, use it to inform your event marketing efforts. Every event brief or experience brief should include high-level persona information. This can help you curate or tailor your messaging, content, agenda, creative, and brand experience to your persona’s preferences and needs. By using your customer persona to guide your experiential marketing strategy, you can increase your chances of reaching and engaging your target audience before, during, and after the event.

Using Personas in Event Marketing and Experiential Marketing

By understanding your event attendees’ preferences and behaviors, you can create a more engaging and memorable event experience.

Here are some more tips for using personas in event marketing and experiential marketing:

1. Identify key segments: Not every attendee needs a persona. When creating personas for event marketing, identify key segments of your target audience, such as industry professionals, or VIPs, analysts, or press and media. By creating personas for each segment, you can tailor your event experience to their specific needs and preferences.
2. Customize your event experience: Once you have identified your key segments, customize your event experience to meet their needs. This can include everything from personalized invitations and outreach, to targeted content, and bespoke interactive experiences that cater to their specific interests and preferences. Don’t forget about post event engagement and content syndication. An executive has different needs than a member of the press.
3. Use data to track engagement: To measure the success of your event marketing efforts, use data to track attendee engagement. This can include everything from registration data, to session attendance, to expo dwell time, to social media engagement, survey responses, and tracking pipeline performance against peer groups based on content consumed. By analyzing this data, you can refine your personas and improve your event marketing strategy over time.

By understanding your audience’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can create more personalized, engaging, and targeted brand experiences and event marketing campaigns. Personas can be used to build more memorable event experiences, and allow you to better connect with your audience and achieve your business, brand, sales, and marketing objectives.