Marketing is, at its core, a form of psychology. To be successful with marketing, you have to intimately understand the person you are advertising to. You need to understand their wants, needs, and dealbreakers no matter your industry.
There’s no better way to do this than to craft a customer persona. Customer personas, when created and leveraged correctly, may significantly bolster your marketing and lead to improved profits from your most important products and services.
Not sure what a customer persona is or where to start? We’ve created this article to answer exactly that, the first step in our series of building a brand.
Customer Personas Explained
In a nutshell, a customer persona is a “semi-fictional” customer for your target audience. Think of customer personas as buyer personalities averaged out across important demographic factors and other information.
For example, an auto body shop may have a customer persona like the following:
- “Tony is a 34-year-old sports car enthusiast who loves tinkering with his 1988 Corvette on his off time. Tony prioritizes straightforwardness and great paint job results, and he doesn’t mind spending a little extra to make sure his ride really shines.”
Customer personas are a critical foundation for creating an effective marketing strategy for your small business.
Why Do Customer Personas Matter?
Customer personas are crucial for your business’s long-term success, especially if you’re in a competitive market or industry niche. Here are some specific ways they may help your company.
Improve Marketing Targeting
Firstly, customer personas give your marketing team a “target” person to advertise to. In all marketing, the more specific your ads are, the more persuasive they are to your target audience. Note that customer personas are not the same things as your target audience per se.
Instead, customer personas are derived from your target audience’s demographic information and other metrics. For instance, if your target audience is single women between the ages of 20 and 45, your customer persona will be a single woman of around 32 or so (the right age to appeal to both groups).
Once your marketing team has this information, they can tailor their:
- Online ads
- In-person ads
- Social media conversations
- And more
… all toward this type of person. Furthermore, customer personas may help your copywriters or advertising brainstormers figure out big marketing campaigns or ideas that might hypothetically seem persuasive to your target audience.
Bottom line: customer personas help your marketing be more effective.
Better Product Iterations
Next, customer personas allow your product manufacturing team to create newer, more successful iterations of your core product lines. The better and more appealing you can make your products to your core audience, the more profits you will theoretically make or sell.
If you understand your target audience through customer personas, you’ll make and sell products that appeal to their interests or needs even more accurately.
A customer persona can reveal:
- Key features that your core audience may desire in a product
- How much money your core audience will likely pay for your product
- What features can be safely ignored or stripped out of your product’s next iteration
In this way, customer personas help you make better, more profitable products depending on your business model or industry.
Boosted Revenue (Long-Term)
Lastly, customer personas may lead to long-term revenue improvements. Customer personas can allow you to:
- Spend less money on marketing since each individual ad will be more successful. Your SEO efforts will also likely be more successful
- Sell more of your core products since those products will be more attractive to your target audience
All of these factors can improve your profit margins and lead to major revenue gains. For these reasons and more, you can’t afford to ignore customer personas any longer.
How to Build a Customer Persona for Your Brand
Fortunately, you can start building a customer persona for your core audience right now. No matter the industry, building a customer persona means following a few key steps.
Identify Your Target Audience
Naturally, you need to know your target audience and their major demographic or other identifying information, including but not limited to:
- Age range
- Sex
- Interests
- Likes and dislikes
- Buying habits or tendencies
- Average income
All of this information will help you learn who is most likely to buy your products or services and how much you can charge for those products and services without driving them away.
Craft a Persona Based on Averages
Next, identify the averages from all the above demographic identifying information. For instance, if your core audience is married men between the ages of 35 and 60, your customer persona will likely be a middle-aged man around 45 or so with an average, “regular” name, such as Derrick or John.
The goal of a customer persona isn’t to perfectly match any single potential customer for your products. The goal is, instead, to make an average customer that represents the collective interests and attributes of most of your target audience members.
Define Name, Interests, and Behaviors
At this point, you can get more specific and start working on the major information of the customer persona, like their name, their interests, and their behaviors.
Put all of this information into a one-to-two paragraph description that your marketing and production teams can utilize. Customer personas should be succinct yet detailed. Here’s another example:
- “Laura is a 25-year-old single woman who loves being at the forefront of fashion. Though she prioritizes glitz and glamour, she’s on a tight budget because she goes to college. She loves finding and buying jewelry and apparel that’s affordable yet higher in quality than the purses and pink earrings she can find in the bargain bin.”
Professional Branding Services
As you can see, building and understanding customer personas for your target consumers can be complex and very tricky. However, you don’t have to do this alone, or spend an arm and leg.
We can help you build a tailored brand strategy that drives major results and that connects deeply with your core buyers. It all starts with a free consultation – contact us today for more information!
