How to create personas for your online ad campaigns in Japan

We have previously introduced the importance of research and knowing your target audience before promoting your business in the Japanese market. Now you’re ready to build user personas for your online ad campaigns in Japan, but are you unsure of how exactly to do this? In this article we guide you through the persona creation process for both social media and PPC campaigns in the Japanese market. But first of all…

What are personas?

Personas are fictional users of your product or service and the ideal customer. There are typically multiple personas to represent all the different user types. Moreover, a company will most likely have different personas per region or market. Hence, it is important to build your user personas before creating your marketing campaigns in Japan.

What should you include in your user persona description?

• Demographics (age, gender, location, income, education, interests, employment, etc.)
• Name and additional characteristics of the fictional persona
• Elaborate on purchasing behaviour and preferred digital channels
• Apply other relevant labels such as generation Z

Creating personas from Google Analytics and PPC data

We can learn a lot about online customers using analytics data from Google and Yahoo! JAPAN. This data includes the users’:

• Location
• Day and time of landing page sessions
• Device type (PC/tablet/mobile)
• Age and gender
• Interests
• In-market segment

Google Analytics data

You can access your website’s visitor data from Google Analytics’ “audience” tab. Learn how to download this report here. 

Yahoo! JAPAN data

If you are running display ads on Yahoo! JAPAN (YDA), you can find out your PPC user demographics. Learn how to download this report here. 

There are also many different digital tools out there that can save you time when creating personas. You can also always contact us for help with research and consultation.

Why are user personas important for PPC?

PPC ads allow the advertiser to target certain user demographics. Although this type of targeting is limited to just a few properties for Google search ads, specific information such as user interests can be targeted for Google Display Network (GDN) and YDA campaigns. Knowing your personas will make it much easier for you to set the targeting for each ad group or ad campaign.

Creating Personas from Social Media Data

Why is social listening a good method of research?

There are 3 main reasons why social listening is an excellent way to build customer personas for your product or service. 

1. There is a wealth of data to access with billions of people active on social media platforms. 
2. This information can be collected instantly through the help of social listening tools (like Brandwatch or Pulsar).
3. It’s not as expensive as running surveys or focus groups.

How do you actually run the social listening research and extract personas?

To build customer personas your first step should be refining your search with the help of a tool for your chosen topic or industry. Then launching, cleaning and receiving your data. Once you have collected the information, you can compile it. At this point demographical, geo-locational and contextual themes will begin to emerge from the people in your data. The more frequent the trend, the more likely that this attribute can be safely connected to that of a customer persona. This can be done manually through data coding or it can also be done automatically (do get in touch as we have access to tools that can do this for you).

How customer personas emerge and why are they useful?

After carrying this out, we can then safely attribute different personas within your chosen dataset and understand how these different groups are, how they feel and how they behave. This type of research can be incredibly powerful information for brands when they are looking to position their products or services in the right way, what marketing decisions to make and how to anticipate the behaviour of their customers correctly. Furthermore, this type of data can enrich the targeting strategy for your social media campaigns such as Instagram ads and LINE ads. 

Need additional support in persona building?

Depicting an accurate image of your customers is crucial to the success of your online marketing campaigns. It may be worthwhile to hire experts who understand the Japanese market as well as someone who can analyse the data. Our team of bilingual Japanese digital marketers have the knowledge and experience in utilising digital tools for analysing PPC and social media data. If you are looking for help in creating user personas for your online business, contact us for further information.