Developing your Target Customer Persona
When creating your marketing strategy, you want to assure that your messages are being sent to the people you actually want to receive it. If you are casting too wide of a net or sending your messaging to the wrong people, your ROI will suffer. Make sure you are sending out targeted messages to your target customers by developing your target customer persona.
In order to effectively engage in targeted marketing campaigns, it is critical to develop your target customer persona(s). Your company might have one target persona, or multiple. However, it is crucial to create targeted messages for different personas.
When you create a targeted marketing campaign, it is important to utilize these personas to deliver messages that customers are actually interested in.
A persona is a compilation of several key characteristics of your intended audience. While some of your customers may not have all of these characteristics, focusing on these personas allows you to create a developed marketing plan.
In B2B marketing, your target persona often includes that person’s position within the company. If you are selling a marketing platform, your target customer is likely a member of their marketing department!
In B2C marketing, your target persona is likely more about demographic or interest characteristics. If you’re a local restaurant, you will want to target the customers within your local area!
These personas can help marketers understand how to address their audience, conduct research on what your audience is actually interested in, and share benefits of your company that interest them!
Here is a great way to develop your customer personas:
1. Talk to your existing or hopeful customers. What do they like about your company or what do they see as benefits? For example, if you are “Best Pizza in Town”, your customers may like that your pizza is authentic, inexpensive, and close by. Some customers may like that you have a great bar selection while others may like that you have a great kids menu.
2. Develop a list of these benefits from your customers. What kind of customer benefits? Going back to the Best Pizza example, the customers that benefit from these positive attributes are customers who are interested in good food, on a budget, and live locally.
3. Create multiple personas based on different interests. For Best Pizza, their one of their target personas (families with kids) is interested in the wonderful kids menu and other kids offerings you have. On the other hand, best pizza is also known for their bar selection. Best pizza should create 2 different personas for these different customers.
-Best Pizza will target these two personas very differently in their marketing campaigns. For families, they will advertise their kids menu and kids activities. For adults without kids, they can advertise their drink specials and happy hour offerings.
-It is important to note that these two personas are very difficult to achieve together. If Best Pizza is able to attract both the families and the happy hour crowds, they should continue to do so. However, if a new business is hoping to attract both of these personas, they should be very strategic in doing so.
Creating these personas is a result of thorough market research and strategic planning. Creating these personas makes it much easier to segment and target your specific interested audience, creating very effective campaigns with a great ROI!
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