Who is the most important person to your business? Is it you? While you may be the owner of your company, you’re not the most important person. If it’s not you, is it your director of marketing or the person acting as your right-hand man or woman? Nope. It’s not either of them.
The most important person to any business is the customer. Without paying customers, your business would cease to exist. Because customers are the true backbone of your organization, it’s vital that you know them intimately in order for you to create a marketing plan that enables you to connect with them.
An Explanation of Personas
While it may sound reasonable that you should know your customers, you might be wondering how you can get to know them without having to hit the floor and engage everyone in conversation. Believe it or not, there is another way to become familiar with your clients and prospects, and it’s by creating personas.
Personas are fictionalized characters you create to represent your ideal customers. While personas are fictional, they need to be believable in order for your whole team to buy into them and for them to reflect the actual people in your target market. To make your imaginary personas believable, give them names, personal histories, motives, attitudes and trigger points. In other words, make your personas as detailed as possible.
When you create detailed personas, your team will develop empathy for your customers. This is important because it’s what will help you to identify your customer’s wants and needs, likes and dislikes, goals and motivations, and successes and failures.
Why Personas Are Important for Your Marketing Strategy
Personas are relevant to your marketing strategy because they can help you fine-tune your marketing activities and your messages. When you know who you’re talking to, it’s much, much easier to communicate using means your target audience will respond to.
To drive this point home, think about the way you answer the phone when your best friend calls compared to how you answer when you don’t recognize the caller’s number. In the first instance, your greeting will likely be quite informal because you know who’s calling whereas your greeting will probably be more guarded in the second instance.
While some people may welcome an informal greeting over a formal one, others will prefer opposite. How can you know if the members of your target audience will respond better to informal or formal marketing messages? By building detailed personas and cultivating them.
Research Is the Key
Now that you know why personas are so important, it’s time to figure out how you can create them. And the key to creating personas that accurately reflect your ideal customers is research. Research is necessary to figure out the “why’s” that drive people to interact with your business and make purchases.
You should use every available resource to conduct your research. Some of the research tools you may want to use include:
- Market segmentation analysis
- Surveys
- Polls
- Interviews
- Social Media
Consult an Expert
If you need help with your marketing strategy in Frisco or a nearby area, you should read about our services now. We can create personas and put together a highly effective marketing strategy for your business no matter what industry you compete in. Contact DB Marcom to learn more today.
