The Power of Knowing Your Audience: Customer Personas Explained
Have you recently wondered how brands know where to show you messages that relate to you? Or have you seen an ad that is so “not for you” that it stood out? If you’ve ever thought, “it feels like they are talking directly to me,” or thought, “this advertisement does NOT relate to me,” both are examples of customer personas! In this blog, we’ll explain customer personas, how to use them, what happens if you don’t, and how to build one.
What the flock is a customer persona?
A customer persona is a broad generalization about a type of customer or marketing audience your brand wants to attract. Typically, a small-to-medium-sized business will have three customer personas, including multiple generalized pieces of information that help marketers understand who they should communicate with, where those audiences are and what they care about.
Let’s look at an example! At HAVEN, we aim to make mavens of our peers and partners, meaning we need an audience that wants to learn! To identify how to reach our target audience, we need to understand who they are, what they care about and where they get their information. We love to share educational content on our blog and across our social media channels (give us a follow on Instagram and LinkedIn), so let’s call our demo persona “Social Sam.”
Who is Social Sam | Building a Customer Persona
To start, we need to understand who Social Sam is at a broad level. We believe that maven is an inclusive term and isn’t generally restricted to one gender or age. We know that our audiences like to laugh, want to learn and are okay with a swear word or two.
Beyond what they look like and how they behave, we also want to know where to find our Social Sam. They are definitely on Instagram and LinkedIn and likely enjoy watching Reels, TikTok videos, or Youtube Shorts, so we prioritize our content to those channels. They also want to find more content that is business related and relies on LinkedIn for industry expertise.
Finally, we look at Social Sam’s pain points. We believe that our target audience, like us, despises marketing buzzwords and b.s. and is frustrated by a ton of marketing jargon. Marketers usually want to know what new trend, best practice or technology is coming out, so they are likely anxious to stay on the forefront of what’s new in marketing. Marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and our work is usually for a greater purpose (like catapulting business to new heights), so we can assume that Social Sam is worried about measuring the results of their work.
How We Use Personas for Marketing
Now that we know who Social Sam is, where we can find them, and what they care about, we can create marketing campaigns directly tailored to them! This might look like a social media campaign that includes memes that challenge the crazy buzzwords and marketing jargon used in the industry. It might consist of a shareable link or graphic about new marketing technology, such as artificial intelligence, or a case study about using automation to measure marketing results effectively.
Once you know what persona you’re reaching, it becomes much easier to create messaging and identify tactics that will attract the target audience you want to sway! If you know that your persona does a lot of searching for information or relies heavily on Google, a paid search campaign might make sense over a direct mail campaign, for instance.
A Life Without Customer Personas
Imagine this: you have significant money to spend on marketing campaigns, like $100,000 or more. Your leaders task you with the goal of using that money to help drive sales leads, create brand awareness and move the company forward.
Without customer personas, you can’t know whether you’re spending your money wisely or placing the right messages on the proper advertising channels. At the end of the campaign, you could spend that money but not have measurable results for your work or dozens of sales leads that do not align with your company (like getting calls for residential house cleaning when you only offer commercial cleaning!).
Thankfully, customer personas are here to help avoid these exact scenarios! Creating a target customer and knowing where to reach them is just as essential as creating an award-winning creative. Customer personas are the right tool to ensure your beautiful messages or designs are effective and powerful.
Do you need help figuring out where to start in identifying your target audience? We can help you. Contact a Maven today to learn about strategy workshops that work to provide clarity around your business.