No matter how you spin it, good marketing strategies must have their audience at the forefront. Absent a clearly defined profile of future customers, brands play a guessing game on the types of customers who need your product or service. So how do you understand exactly who you’re talking to? By creating valuable marketing personas that explain who they are, the challenges they are facing, their behaviors, and how your brand can be most useful and desirable to them. A marketing persona is a fictional “sketch” of a key segment of your target audience. It is a combination of their demographics such as age and gender, and a heavy dose of psychographics that makes them tick. Marketing personas are a comprehensive map of your audience’s minds and personalities, allowing you to step into their shoes and intimately understand how to best connect your brand to them.
We regularly urge the brands we work with to avoid the temptation of marketing to everyone. Instead, incorporate personas to communicate with those who are mostly likely to listen, and buy. Here are some of the top reasons why defined customer personas are a “must have” when mapping out a strategic marketing plan for any brand:
Identify Needs
By understanding the needs and wants of your target personas, you now know what they’re looking for from your product or service and also what they expect from your company. Having this insight is critical in mapping out how to sell to them and what offers (and messages) they will find appealing. It may even lead you to create and offer new services that solve newly revealed challenges they may have.
Behaviors
A good customer persona shows you how your target audience makes their purchase decisions, where they spend time online and how they spend their days offline. This insight can be applied to your marketing strategy by understanding and adjusting how to communicate with them, how to reach new customers, what type of content to produce and what channels are most relevant for incorporation into the media channel plan.
Targeting Content
Since we now know what your customer persona finds valuable, you can target your content towards those values and develop content that is most relevant to them. It is important to remember that just because a business owner or CMO thinks certain information is valuable, it doesn’t necessarily mean the customers will. It is key to always put the customers first. Defined audience personas provide an opportunity to create separate ad content for each persona, and this advanced level of targeting increases conversion rates and improves social ad campaigns.
Quality Sales Leads
By understanding your ideal customer’s interests, the content they prefer, and where they go to find it, you can create the marketing materials which cater to the right people, at the right time, and the right place. This can help you build better lead generating strategies that targeting your various personas. By utilizing your investment to target those likeminded to your customer personas, you’re generating better quality leads and maximizing your ad spends.
By compiling your customers traits into personas, you’re creating a solid representation of the actual humans you want to attract, seeing the complete picture of your buyers. When you know your ideal customer is a 34-year old stay-at-home mom named Becky who has two middle-school age kids, drives a Volvo, shops at Whole Foods and loves podcasts, you’re in a better position to create a plan that speaks directly to her, instead of trying to market to a “thirty-something female” or another faceless statistic.
Are you ready to establish your buyer persona so you can segment your audience and begin creating more effective marketing campaigns? Contact Morgan & Co. today. We can help home in on who your audience is and what they are looking for in your brand while simultaneously increasing engagement.