Ask any marketing expert for their advice and they’ll stress the importance of building different marketing personas for your brand.
Why? Because personas help you define your audience while providing paths towards getting in front of each member of your target market.
For example, a fitness brand might have one persona of a fitness-crazed millennial, but also a 40-year-old mother of 3 — two very different personas, both of which need to be defined so the brand can speak to them.
Creating marketing personas helps you “step back” and answer critical questions about your marketing strategy before getting caught up in the details. Here are several ways to build the perfect marketing personas for your brand.
In order for all of your marketing personas to be helpful for your marketing plan, they need to be organized in the same manner. Otherwise, you risk having one persona less defined than the others.
To avoid that mistake, come up with the same list of questions that you will ask when developing them.
These questions don’t have to be groundbreaking. In fact, simple, generic questions can be helpful in defining your personas.
For example, asking questions such as “Who are they?”, “Where do they live?”, “What do they do for a living?”, and “What problems do they have?” yield crucial answers.
These questions will help you find the reason they want your product or service, so you can further appeal to them and more people like them.
You’ve probably noticed the different categories that your clients fall into, so start by replicating each of those categories. Reach out to your clients and ask them a series of questions for marketing research. Most of them will be happy to help!
Be sure to discover what the main reason was for initially purchasing your product or service. Maybe it was out of desperate need. Perhaps it was an impulse purchase. Or maybe they did thorough research to find your company.
What about your brand makes them continuously come back? Is it the personal vibe of your brand? Is it your customer service? Your price point?
The answers that you receive will help you define personas based on the different pain points that you find.
How does your product or service help people reach their goals? What does your target market aspire to accomplish?
If you own a local gym, for example, your clients might have come to get into tip-top shape at the prime of their lives, lose a few pounds before their wedding, reverse years of bad fitness, or simply to be with friends while taking fun-filled fitness classes.
For each type of client, you need marketing that speaks to their motivation.
One of the best strategies for finding your customer goals is by sitting down with your sales staff. They can fill you in on what your customers are saying and the main reasons that they use your services above all others.
Ask basic questions, then drill down to specifics. The answers may surprise you.
By this point, you have a plethora of valuable information at your fingertips. Now comes the time for you to organize that info in a helpful way.
Set aside time for your team to map out the different marketing personas your company has.
Many marketing teams like to keep the number of personas low — 4 or 5 — but your brand might have wider reach than that. If you try to tackle a persona for each customer you’ve come into contact with, you may never finish.
These marketing personas should be specific enough to help you target certain niches of your prospect base, yet general enough to appeal to the masses.
Find a space in your office where you can list out every single fear, goal, motivation, and detail on your customers that you’ve found. Then take the time to see which answers line up with your various marketing techniques.
You’ll find that some of the characteristics of each persona are unique, while others are vastly similar. Identifying both will help you gear your marketing tactics towards grabbing the attention of each persona that you create!
These tips should help you get more insight into your brand’s value. Marketing is all about playing up that value.
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