Creating Your Marketing Personas – Why It’s Important
People in marketing usually know their business. They’re savvy about what sells, and who it sells to. At least, you’d think that was the case. However, when you think about it, how do to they come about getting this data? How do they know what will sell to each person? Are they mystical muses sent from Roman gods? Can they predict the future? Do they have an innate ability to tune in to “what people want”? No, that’s not the case. While there are certainly some people who are extremely gifted at figuring out what it is “the people” like, most of the time this data comes from extensive market research. Why is this important to you, though? Are you an ad exec at a top marketing firm? Odds are, no. Are you a business owner? Odds are, yes. That is why it’s important to you! Though you may not “do” marketing for a living, you still need to know how to properly market your company/business without throwing caution, and dollars, to the wind.
How do we accomplish this? We accomplish this by creating several marketing personas. What are marketing personas, you ask? Well, they are basically idealistic versions of each type of customer that would be interesting in purchasing your product/services. Every business has several personas, whether they’d like to think so or not. Your customers cannot be boiled down to one ideal persona. Rather, you need to be creative and understand that there are many reasons why someone would approach your business/company for a product/service. The first thing you should do is sit down with a piece of paper and a pen, and brainstorm.
First, start writing out what each product/service it is that you have to offer. Then, for each product/service, begin asking yourself, “Who would purchase this?” I’ll give you an example. Let’s say my business was a custom cake bakery. What is my product/service that people would buy? It would be easy to say that my product/service was “custom cakes”. Instead, why not break it down further? What types of custom cakes are there? Custom birthday cakes? Custom wedding cakes? Custom anniversary cakes? There’s a lot to choose from. I should write out each potential cake category someone could purchase. From there, I need to dig deep into the type of personality that would purchase a specific category of cake. Let’s use “custom birthday cake” as an example. Who would purchase a custom birthday cake? First thing that springs to mind is “parent of young child”. Next thing that springs to mind is “birthday party planner”. What else could there be? There are numerous possibilities. If I begin to pin down all the services/products that I offer, I can figure out who all my marketing personas are, and what market share I’d like to give to them, and market to their needs. If, for instance, I believe that parents of young children looking for custom birthday cakes are going to make up 80% of my business’ profits, then I’ll want to be sure to wrap my marketing strategy around that persona primarily.
Do you see why marketing personas are so important? Otherwise, you’re throwing money blindly at anybody or anything that walks/browses past you. Instead, be smart. Spend some time researching the different types of people you’d like to target, and THEN wrap your marketing strategy and dollars around those personas in order to reap the benefits.
