A warm welcome back to all you digital marketing ass-kickers out there! The recent Volumes of the 36 Chambers Of Digital Marketing have been centred around getting more from your digital marketing efforts, but today I wanted to take a step back and focus on something a little different by looking at how Customer Personas can help you take your branding and marketing to the next level.
What Is A Customer Persona?
Your Customer Persona(s) is a selection of elements that define your Perfect Customer, the type of person who would fully buy into your industry, and commit to your services and products.
You could then use your Customer Persona as the focus for all your branding, content and marketing moving forward, allowing you to identify the best way to communicate with your audience to maximise results.
Defining Your Customer Persona
Your Customer Persona can consist of any element that you feel defines your Perfect Customer, and with every industry being completely different there are no strict guidelines to which elements should be added to it. However, there are a few core elements that would typically go into your ‘CP’ - these include:
Age
Gender
Location
Income
Job Role / Industry
Relationship Status
Interests
Technology Abilities (eg. Can they work a mobile phone)
Motivations
Frustrations
Can You Have More Than 1 Customer Persona?
You might find that your brand would benefit from more than just the one CP as your messaging might change depending on the persona that you're focusing on.
If you were a fashion retailer, you may have one Female CP and a Male CP to allow you to address both genders differently in terms of colours, wording and imagery.
You may even split your CP into various age brackets because let's face it, millennials respond differently to how someone in their 60s would.
I would suggest that you want to keep everything as straightforward as possible and to only set up more than one CP if you 100% feel it is needed. Keep your process simple, because simple always wins!
Customer Persona Example
Now that you have discovered some CP elements to include, you should be able to understand how each can help define your Perfect Customer, and then see how this can be used to find the best way to communicate with them.
To help you understand a little more, I have put together an example of a CP for the watch brand Rolex:
Age: 35 - 65
Gender: Male & Female
Location: Areas of the world with higher levels of wealth
Income: Top 20% incom
Job Role/Industry: Higher level employment (Owner, Manager etc…) at a higher salary based industry.
Interests: Luxury Purchases, Traveling, Cars, Fine Dining
Motivations: Wants to feel a sense of achievement. Wants to own the best. Wants to be part of an exclusive, elite group.
After reading the various elements of the persona, you should be able to identify the language that this audience would resonate with most, the images that would pull them in, and the emotions that you would want them to feel whenever they see/hear of the Rolex brand.
The Rolex CP would want to see high levels of sophistication across the board, with each word and image expressing luxury, precision and excellence, allowing them to feel as if they were part of a most elite, exclusive club.
With this now identified, all forms of communications, branding and marketing should be tailored to match this audience characteristics, maximising the chances of them seeing the brand, buying into the feelings that it evokes, and then making a purchase (which could lead to multiple purchases).
Your Customer Persona May Change... And That Is Ok
You might draw up your CP initially only to find that the people who resonated with your services/products were slightly different from what you had expected. This is 100% ok (especially when just starting a new business) as you can then readjust your CP to match the characteristics of your new audience.
This might then see you make tiny tweaks to your messaging, branding and advertising efforts to favour the newly defined audience which should help increase performance overall.
Time To Create Your Customer Persona
Now that you know what a Customer Persona is, how it can be created, and how to use them across all your branding, messaging and advertising, it is time to put your new skills into action.
I would love to know how you get on with this, and how you used them to help you with your approach to your branding, so feel free to drop me a message about your Customer Personas at hello@alipuglianini.com.
Ciao for now,
Ali