Personae Marketing Part II: How to Determine What Your Personae Need
In the first part of this series, we discussed what personae-based marketing is and how to determine who your target audience is. This is important because it helps you avoid throwing away marketing dollars chasing people who aren’t interested in what you’re offering.
Once you know who your target audience is, the next step is to build your understanding of what they need. Once you know what they need, you can make sure they find this information in your marketing materials—assuming you really can address their needs. In a perfect world your programs deliver exactly what they need, delivered exactly when and how they need it delivered.
A word on wants and needs. We all know these are two different things, right? But to simplify this discussion we’re going to focus on needs, assuming prospective students can adjust their wants to match the real world. Besides, if we truly meet their needs we’ll all be just fine.
Getting Started: What Do They Need?
We like a three-step process for determining what your student population needs:
- Review the personae you have developed for each of your programs. (For more on personae development and the basic concepts behind personae-based marketing, read Part I in this series.)
- Review enrollment data to see if data supports your assumptions and to expand your understanding of your students.
- Survey students and graduates to ensure their feedback aligns with your hypothesis.
To explore this process, we will use a healthcare program provided at a community college and a personae developed for that institution.
Personae
Let’s take a look at our personae Kara, a student at a small community college.
Kara H.
Summary: Kara is a young single mother working in the healthcare field. She loves her job, but her place of employment requires continuing education classes to keep her license current. She has limited time and resources. She doesn’t own a car, so she prefers online coursework that empowers her to manage the many demands on her time.
How she becomes a student: To catch Kara’s eye, a school needs to showcase convenience, affordability, and safety. And they need to offer online courses.
What matters to Kara: Kara cares about Programs, Price, and mostly about finding a flexible program to help her meet her goals.
From this personae, it’s logical to assume Kara needs:
- Specific continuing education credits that support her license
- Courses that are provided in a convenient manner, most likely online and, if synchronous, in the evenings or on weekends
- Affordable tuition and fees and/or financial aid
Enrollment Data
To confirm these assumptions, you’ll want to consider factors such as enrollment data for the past several semesters. Do the average age, profession, licensure or certification, and other demographic characteristics of your existing students match Kara? If not, you need to adjust your personae.
This is also a good time to check your course offerings. For example, you might assume Kara needs a class like “Fall Prevention for Older Adults,” but your enrollment data may tell you this class is unpopular and another class “COVID and Beyond: Spring 2023” is actually the more popular class for healthcare providers seeking continuing education.
Your enrollment data can also help you determine what your students are looking for in other ways. It’s easy to assume a single mother working full time would prefer the convenience of online classes that can be taken asynchronously, on her schedule. However, enrollment data may indicate in-person classes are preferred, and a little deeper dig may reveal this is because the classes in demand are best delivered in a format where students can practice on others or ask questions of the instructor.
Surveys
Finally, ask questions. If you have the resources available, you will want to survey existing students and graduates to find out what first drew them to your institution and then what they feel they have gotten out of the program.
Effective surveys are short, to the point, and provide some sort of reward for taking them.
A survey designed for the audience of a community college might look like this:
Hello, Kara! Congratulations! You recently completed the “COVID and Beyond: Fall 2022” course.
Your feedback makes a difference. Would you take three minutes to answer the following questions for us? Your input is greatly appreciated!
- How did you first learn about our COVID and Beyond: Fall 2022 course?
- Online search
- Searching the college’s website
- A flier on a bulletin board at work
- From a colleague
- Website of a professional organization
- Other (please specify)
- You took COVID and Beyond: Fall 2022 online. If it were available in person, would you have preferred to take it:
- Online
- In person, only if offered in the evening
- In person, only if offered on the weekends
- In person regardless of time offered
- We are proud to offer COVID and Beyond: The Vaccine Strikes Back Spring 2023. What would make you more likely to take this course?
- If financial aid were offered
- If my work would cover the cost
- If I were required to take it for work
- Other
We could quickly come up with two dozen items, and short surveys are always best in these matters. If the volume of students is high, consider using all twenty-four items in six small surveys, with random assignment to a survey for each graduate. And, if you have the time and budget, consider using focus groups. For the price of a box of donuts and twenty minutes of your time you can ask all twenty-four questions, with follow ups when needed.
In either case make sure each item is unambiguous and meaningful. Muddy data because a question was not specific is useless, and well-honed survey items will yield actionable results.
Finally, if you can, it's a good idea to hold a raffle with a few items from the college bookstore for those who complete the survey. It’s amazing how motivating a free sweatshirt can be, and how the chance at a free sweatshirt can improve survey responses.
Concluding What Students Need
Once you’ve compiled the results of your personae analysis, enrollment data and survey results, you are ready to put together a testable hypothesis regarding what your target audience wants. Your hypothesis may look like this:
Our student demographic for the course “COVID and Beyond: Fall 2022” is looking for healthcare continuing education courses that are:
- Affordable
- Cost is covered by place of employment
- Offered online or in the evenings and weekends
- Safe environment where women are unafraid to attend in the evenings
- Meet the requirements for a specific healthcare career
Your challenge, then, becomes delivering on this need. It’s true, you cannot be all things to all people, but if you want to be successful in the competitive world of student recruiting you’re going to have to meet prospects’ needs... and exceed their expectations whenever possible!
What Next?
Once you have identified what you think your target audience is looking for you will want to craft a message specific to your audience. Then, you’ll deliver the message where your audience will see it and finally test to ensure your marketing efforts are getting results. It’s a research project, after all. And like all research projects it begins with developing and testing a hypothesis, followed by revision of the hypothesis and retesting. Over and over again.
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Want More?
Read the whole series:
