Getting Inside Your Customers’ Heads

All successful marketing campaigns have one thing in common – they know their target audience inside and out.  They know where to find their audience and how to communicate with them and motivate them.  They understand their audience and the problem their audience is trying to solve with their products or services.  One way to do this is by developing detailed personas to use when developing your marketing campaign.

A persona is an imaginary composite representing your ideal customer.  It’s helpful to use different personas for different segments of your audience.  A marketing persona should include demographic information about your actual and potential ideal customers, but more importantly, it needs to reflect their actions.  Consider how they use the internet.  Which social media do they use?  How do they participate?  When?  Your product or service is a potential solution to a problem your customers have.  What are they looking for online to help their decision-making – more information about the problem they want to solve? Research on the causes and implications of the problem. Success stories about how others have solved the problem?  Explanations of how possible solutions work?

Solid, ongoing research is the key to an effective marketing persona.  Don’t start with your product and work back to who your target market is.  Start with the target market and research how they deal with the problem your product or service solves.  Study your social media carefully.  Which posts get shares and reactions?  What do people say in the comments?  What gets ignored?  You don’t need to know everything about your persona, but you do need to study the behaviours of your online buyers and followers.   Educated guesses are helpful, but imagining or projecting your own views won’t help you develop the persona you need.

A persona, like a real person, needs to keep growing and evolving to function well.  People change.  Markets change. Therefore, personas must change too.  In practical terms, that means your research is never finished and your marketing efforts follow the lead of your evolving persona.  The research should be part of your broader marketing plan, and you need to be agile with changing your marketing plan to keep pace.

Using a persona helps you craft the digital marketing campaign that will be the most powerful in reaching and motivating your potential customers.  It makes it easier to engage them, and it helps you keep empathy for them at the centre of your efforts.  Empathy for your potential customers isn’t just nice; it is what enables you to most effectively reach them and convert visits to purchases.

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