If you’re doing any kind of marketing, you may be aware of the buyer persona: This is a profile of the kind of customer you’d like to have as a marketer. Its importance is paramount to the success of many marketing campaigns. I’ll mention an example: There was this content marketing team that pinpointed who their ideal persona was. When they created content published on the blog, thinking about this type of person, numbers rose. When they relaxed their fixation on the buyer persona, everything went downhill, so they corrected their path.
You’ve Heard About Niches, Right?
In the wild, when people talk about marketing, they tend to say the word: niches often. This phenomenon may happen because choosing niches is a way of saying: You can’t sell to everybody, there are people more interested in your products and services than others.
Then, persona marketing is related to niches because you’re not catering to everybody else, but to a specific part of the population. The persona symbolizes a group of people with similar characteristics you’ve previously uncovered through data. As you can see, the process to uncover the symbolized person is analytical as well as creative.
The Power of Marketing – Look-Alike Audiences
Many individuals see the process of marketing planning as an academic pursuit far removed from reality. This is far from the truth. Let me show an example. Let’s say you’ve worked hard to get your first clients. What should you do next? Common sense and an entrepreneurial knack can get you to the next level, or not.
But you can bet on marketing principles to inspire you. You’ll find the principle of persona marketing in action in certain software features, especially those on ads. Let’s say you have a group of people who are your most profitable clients, you can now cater to similar individuals, taking these existing customers as an example. This may increase your profits remarkably while avoiding the headaches of hit-and-miss strategies.
But the power of the concept goes beyond the digital realm. Let’s say you have found a considerably profitable client profile, then you can grow your business seamlessly by taking them as inspiration for your ideal persona. And of course, in Marketing and Advertising, you should think about your customer often anyway.
Being Thorough – Getting the Data
Most people, even marketers, pressed for time, tend to just write what comes to mind when it comes to creating these personas. While being of the utmost importance, the challenge gets relegated to a pressing list of to-dos.
Qualitative research: Qualitative research is truly powerful when it comes to insights and shouldn’t be relegated. Much of the business meetings are sprinkled with primary data coming from experiences from stakeholders, sometimes aided by adequate data, which leads us to the next category.
Quantitative research: Research has always been critical to the body of knowledge of marketing, which leads to today, where you’re in for a treat for tools that let you see at a glance if the profile of a person is suitable for your marketing goals. You can perform primary research physically, or you can mine data from the web to support the knowledge that will lead you to success when catering to those clients where you can exchange the most value.
Updating The Persona Data – Insights and Further Research
When it comes to keeping the profile of the person updated, you should know that as time passes, the same persona may change, but a human may change. Or maybe you’ll want to keep the same persona, considering individuals who come to fit such a profile. As an example for this, if you’re marketing a clothing brand, you may want to grow in age with your clients, or you’ll want to cater to those coming of age to whom you’ll want to appeal. In any case, your proposal adapts to the profile of this client.
Persona Marketing – Keeping it in mind always
It’s interesting that if you’re in a department other than marketing or sales, you may even forget you’re dealing with customers. As an example of this, if you’re in operations to deliver a product, your day may be filled with stats about the route, features of the software you’re using, employee rotation, and so on. If you’re in finance, you may be checking spreadsheets often, reading reports, and thinking about expenses most of your day.
So, it’s up to you in marketing and sales to remember the customer, arguably the raison d’être of the whole enterprise. And when you remember the client, you may remember a particular name, or you may take a mind shortcut and symbolize these ideal customers through a persona, to better connect as a human to your work while improving your execution.
