Understanding your customers is critical for the success of your marketing efforts. You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes if you want to stand out from your competitors. This is why it’s important to create personas that represent your target audience.
What is a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is a semi-fictional archetype that depicts a particular segment of your audience and gives you a view of your customers based on the commonalities they share. These similarities can be their goals, pain points, motivations, frustrations, and expectations.
To make all of your advertising dollars count and market to your target audience, you first have to research between two to four key consumer types. Once you have established who your general audience is, then you can determine what types of consumers you want to target. To create a user persona, develop a fictional character with a visual focus on who he or she is, provide a picture, age, occupation, and a description about their personal lives and daily habits. Once completed, tape your user personas up at your desk and begin figuring out the strategy to market to that particular type of person(s).
Creating user personas is helpful when deciding the most effective way to communicate with your consumer. For all elderly personas, you may choose newspaper and/or other forms of mailed material. When you get into the early 30s-or middle 20s, you may choose a more interactive approach to gain millennial-type attention. High school and pre-college age adults (Generation Z) are less active on social media because it hinders their trust – consequently, leading them to pay more attention to traditional forms of media.
As the recent subject of a user persona, let me give you a little insight into my daily habits. My user persona includes: female, late 20s, full-time employee and mother. With that being said, I’m a busy person and most of the information that reaches me is through Facebook or online new sources. I watch very little TV, but when I do it’s on DVR so I can fast forward through commercials. The most effective advertising to me would be a flashy direct mail piece, e-marketing, or social ads. To grab my attention, make it quick, short, and to the point. Tell me what you’re selling and my benefit of purchasing. When it comes to impulse buying for me it’s all in how well it is designed and/or packaged.
There are multitudes of ways to target your consumer. Knowing the user personas will help you reach your target effectively without wasting valuable advertising dollars.
