Meet Pleo, the cutest infant dinosaur born this century! UGOBE is the mother designer. When it got pregnant with it, it knew that the internet is a great ally to propel its message about its coming product.

If you've attempted to do online marketing, you've realized how overwhelmingly chaotic and fragmented the Internet is. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of online social communities, blogs, groups, you name it! Where to start marketing and who-to could be a daunting question many face when they start attempting to market on the web.

The marketers of Pleo at UGOBE realized that in order to do an effective online marketing they needed to develop personas of their target audience. Initially UGOBE thought that the perfect "buyer" persona is children between the ages of 7-12. This is very logical, isn't it? If you look at Pleo, it's a captivating baby dinosaur with those wide eyes, engineered with senses of sound, sight, and touch. How can children not be the right persona!?

UGOBE found that it wasn't right about the children being the main buyer persona. To determine the appropriate personas, they sent out an email survey (and regarding surveys I recommend reading my previous blog: The Business Idea) to 1,900 people who had registered at the pre-launch site they put together for Pleo. The biggest surprise they learned from this survey is that one of their main buyer personas is: women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s! Those women found that Pleo was wonderful and brings out a nurturing instinct that makes them fall in love with him.

The marketing team for Pleo now knew who to target for this persona. So, they developed a marketing message targeted for these women. And they positioned Pleo as the cute family pet.

Before you start marketing online, I highly recommend you research and define your buyer personas. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of effort and money targeting people that might not be interested. Besides, your marketing message might end up being too broad and not targeted. Defining your personas before you start executing your marketing is important as you saw with Pleo's example. It could reveal some insights about your buyers that you never thought of.

In my next blog, I'm going to tell you how we developed personas for my company, MiNeeds.

Best Regards,
Raed Malhas
Founder, www.MiNeeds.com, A New Way to Shop Local Services