Who are you aiming your brand at? To build the best marketing strategy possible and to determine your buyers’ needs, it is important to create marketing personas: the ideal customer for your business.
Before creating any kind of marketing strategy, it is essential to know your customer’s profiles. Indeed, there can be several types of potential buyers for the very same offer. This is where personas come into play.
What Is A Marketing Persona?
Personas are the composing drawings of a category of buyers. It allows your brand to identify the different characteristics of your targets. A marketing expert should be able to create buyers personas, not unlike how a writer would create his characters. Without knowing who your ideal customers are, how could you build an effective marketing strategy?
When creating your personas, you should think about their background, their goals, their challenges, their character traits, and even how they dress, to fully understand your ideal customers and to offer your audience a message that will truly resonate with them.
Personas for marketing are not only a step in building your marketing strategy: it should be the staple of your strategy. Usually, 4 or 5 personas per product are enough to get a satisfying spectrum of potential costumers. Keep in mind that personas can vary from industries, from B2B (a buyer with a very specific needs that your brand can resolve easily) to B2C (buyers with more personal needs, that will answer to emotional approaches), and from country to country.
How To Create Personas And To Add More Informations To Them?
To create effective personas, you will have to gather a lot of information and make some researches. It is extremely important to pay attention to details and to update your personas regularly. To build the perfect personas, you can look for two types of data:
Internal data are the ones that industries, companies, and brands have access to (CRM systems, billing tools, etc.). Employees’ knowledge concerning the market can also be taken into account. External data on the other hand need some deeper researches.
To fully understand the buyers’ needs and to build accurate personas, you can create a poll aimed at a representative panel, make market researches or a Net Promoter Score research study, a study regarding the popularity of the brand on online forums or social networks, look for the consumers’ feedbacks, etc.
Without personas, there is no legit marketing strategy. Creating a well-defined persona take time, especially because it is so important to pay attention to every single data source. A persona can also evolve, therefore you should update them at least once a year to not go back to square one once the data are outdated. Markets and competitors are quick to evolve, and your personas and business must adapt!
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