What is a Persona?
Put simply, a persona is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal contact. It is the person you are thinking of as you write your content, design your call-to-actions, run ads, and develop your filters.
1. Read
Imagine a water well in the middle of a village and everyone’s home is surrounding that water source. There are hundreds of different ways that villagers could walk to this well, but this usually doesn’t happen. Generally, a common path forms, the grass gets worn down, rocks are removed, and it eventually is paved.
Likewise, there are countless ways that someone can come to know Christ, as each person is unique. Many people, however, tend to follow similar paths in their journey to Christ.
In marketing, a persona is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal contact. It is the person you are thinking of as you write your content, design your call-to-actions, run ads, and develop your filters.
The simplest way to get started on your persona is to think through the following three questions. You can do this on your own or brainstorm it with people you work with.
Who is my audience?
- Are they employed? Families? Leaders?
- What are their age?
- What kind of relationships do they have?
- How educated are they?
- What is their socioeconomic status?
- What do they think of Christians?
- Where do they live? In a city? In a village?
Where is the audience when they use media?
- Are they at home with family?
- Is it in the evening after the kids go to bed?
- Are they riding the metro between work and school?
- Are they alone? Are they with others?
- Are they primarily consuming media through their phone, computer, television, or tablet?
- Why are they using media?
What do you want them to do?
- Private message you on your social media page?
- Share your content with others?
- Debate to increase engagement and an audience?
- Read articles on your website?
- Call you?
A pathway that is shown to be be fruitful is “disillusioned with [the dominant religion in your context]”. People who see hypocrisy and emptiness in religion often grow weary of its effects and start searching for truth. Could this be a pathway for you as well? Would you want to find the people in your city who are walking away from empty religion and hoping there is another way?
Another way to look at your persona is to consider your own journey to Christ. Consider how God might use your story and your passion in connecting seekers with Him. Maybe you have experience in fighting and overcoming addictions and could develop a persona around that. Perhaps your target people group are curious about prayer and its power. Your persona could be heads of household who will reach out to you for prayer for their family. Maybe you are brand new in a country and can only meet with English speakers. Your target people could be English speakers who are disillusioned with Islam, Catholicism, etc.
Note: Kingdom.Training has created a new and more in-depth course on Personas.
2. Fill Out Workbook
Before marking this unit as complete, be sure to finish the corresponding questions in your workbook.
3. Go Deeper
Resources:
- Kingdom.Training has created a new and more in-depth course on Personas.
- You might also find the blog from Hubspot helpful.
- Mobile Ministry Forum provides a template that you can use as well as examples.
- Consider walking through Mobile Ministry Forums Foundation Lessons. They have great in depth insights to creating Personas.
- MII’s Persona Template
Persona Research
The 10-step training on Kingdom.Training is designed to help get you started in implementing a media strategy to identify spiritual seekers. Obviously, you could spend weeks or months interviewing seekers and learning about your persona. If you are an outsider to your target people group, you will need to spend significantly more time researching your persona or rely heavily on a local partner to help shape content for your target audience. After you finish the 10-step training, you (and/or your team) can go back and spend more time developing your persona. The following resources will help you.
- Use this interview guide to learn more about personas and how to conduct interviews with local believers who have gone on a recent faith journey toward Christ.