A well-developed target persona allows your brand to gain a better understanding of your ideal customer’s needs, wants, and behaviors. To answer the question: what is a target persona? —It is a fictionalized example of the consumer who most often buys your product or service. It's an extremely important but often overlooked tool for your marketing toolbelt.
Using this information derived from data gathering and learning your consumers' common pain points, life situations, and more, you can then create a marketing strategy that speaks directly to them, leading to stronger relationships, higher conversion rates, and increased revenue. Discover more about how a target persona can revolutionize your business!
1. Segmentation
When you create a target persona, this will allow you to focus your marketing campaigns. Consequently, your campaigns will resonate with your specific customer group who have similar characteristics and needs. Look at it like this, you aren’t leaving out potential customers by narrowing down your focus, instead, you are simply putting your hard-earned resources and your advertising dollars towards an area where it will have the most impact. You are helping the arrow hit the bull’s eye and avoiding spending money on a group of people who simply aren't interested in your product or service.
Persona Example: While what segmentation looks like for your brand will differ from other businesses, a good example of how a target persona helps with segmentation is to consider a company that sells outdoor gear or clothing. Their target personas will be based on the needs and preferences of hikers and campers.
2. Message Development
If you want your brand’s message to come through loud and clear and promote action, you first need to understand the needs, wants, and pain points of your target customer. This will help you to create messaging that addresses those particular issues head-on and motivates the audience to get moving, take action, make a purchase, contact you, etc. Your message as a brand should be relevant to your customer base. This ensures your brand will offer exactly what your consumers need, solve their problems and speak in their language.
Persona Example: A skincare company has developed a message through a well-formed target persona. This information could indicate that they should market to busy working women. Therefore, part of this brand’s marketing should promote their products’ convenience and efficiency. This means instead of focusing on perhaps a message about the skincare’s environmental factors, they will instead focus more on how quickly the products can be applied or how easy it is to reorder a product on their website, or perhaps, even offer subscriptions that automatically send products.
3. Channel Selection
Another reason to utilize a target persona as part of your marketing strategy is to help you select the right channels for your audience. A target persona will help identify the marketing channels that your customers spend the most time using and highlight their preferences and habits. There are several types of channels you can use to best address your audience and meet them where they live and work so to speak.
The following are some of the most commonly used marketing channels in today’s campaigns:
- Radio: Many consumers still get their information and news from the radio. Therefore, it has a tremendous reach.
- Social Media: In today’s society, this marketing channel cannot be overlooked. A Pew Research Center Poll found that seven out of every ten Americans regularly use social media to connect with each other, share information, for entertainment, and more. This means that virtually any audience is likely to spend time on social media sites and apps.
- Magazine Advertising: Another notable channel that should not be overlooked is magazine advertising. This too has been around for a good while but still holds some value even in today’s digital age.
- Digital Presence: Last but certainly not least, your website and inbound and outbound marketing efforts are yet another way to market your brand.
Persona Example: Consider a supplement company that advertises on the radio and local magazines after their data research showed that seniors (their target audience) were more likely to consume news and information that way than from other outlets.
4. Lead Generation
Obviously, your goal when creating a marketing campaign is gaining leads and converting those leads into customers. Thankfully, by better understanding the pain points of your target persona, you can tailor your marketing efforts and increase your chances of earning a lead.
Persona Example: A home security company could use target persona creation to create a specific offer for new homeowners where they would get a free security assessment to address their pain points of feeling safe and secure. In other words, through the target persona creation, this brand learned that its customers worry about safety. Then, they used that to create an actionable offer that would hopefully promote lead generation.
We Can Help
For businesses to thrive in today’s ultra-competitive market, a well-developed target persona can make all the difference. You can develop better products, provide better customer service and create tailored marketing campaigns all by understanding your ideal customer better through the creation of a target persona. Contact us at Zimmer Communications to learn more about how to create a target customer persona for your brand and then how to use that information to get the most out of your marketing endeavors. 