Customer personas: Who exactly are you marketing to anyway?
Understanding who you are marketing to is a critical but often overlooked component in any marketing plan.
If you can't quite define your audience, you'll want to create customer personas.
Customer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer and involve demographic and psychometric data.
What are customer personas?
When building campaigns, posting across social or building and optimizing your website, you'll want to refer back to your customer personas.
You want to know who you are marketing to so you can effectively speak their language, alleviate their pain points, create the kind of content they find valuable, and meet them on the digital channels they frequent.
Collecting information for customer personas
Google Analytics is an excellent option for finding data tied to personas. Google Analytics provides demographic and psychometric data that can help shape your target market.
We can also look at the keywords people use to find us, what blog content is gaining traction, or what service pages your audience visits the most.
Speaking with customer care teams, conducting surveys, or speaking directly with clients is another option for gathering information.
Once you've created your quantitive and qualitative data, you'll want to get started crafting your personas.
Creating customer personas
When creating your customer personas you want to ask a number of questions that give you a clearer idea of the motivations and pain points of your audience. You’ll want to look at:
Demographics: What is their age, income, gender, where do they live?
What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve in relation to your services? (i.e., find a knowledgeable realtor, find a fitness routine, etc.)
What are their challenges or frustrations? What challenges do they come up against when they are seeking out products or services like yours?
What are their hobbies or interests? What challenges do they come up against when they are seeking out products or services like yours?
What might motivate them to buy? Are they motivated by convenience? Price? Being socially conscious? Professional advancement?
What objections might they have? What challenges do they come up against when they are seeking out products or services like yours?
What is their buying role? Are they the decision-maker, or do you need to arm with information to convince their boss to sign off on your offering?
What is their content consumption? Where do they find information? What kind of content resonates with them? Podcasts? News? Social Channels?
Find downloadable worksheets for creating customer personas here.
Communicating with your audience
You may have a hazy answer to all of these questions, but it is essential to take a minute and jot them down. When you update your website or create your next campaign, you’ll want to think about your customer personas and how you are providing value or helping them solve a problem.
Now that you know who you’re communicating with you want to ask yourself:
What kind of information would my audience find valuable?
What kind of messaging resonates with them? What motivates them?
What kind of creative or branding might they engage with?
Within my budget, what are the best channels to reach my audience?
campaign planning worksheet
If you haven’t quite nailed your messaging yet, visit this article. You’ll find exercises and worksheets for communicating your value and why people should choose you. This step is extremely helpful for all touch points of the digital marketing journey from planning campaigns, to landing page and website copy.
Investing time & resources wisely
These days there are countless tools and channels to potentially reach your audience.
However, many small business owners, solopreneurs, and lean marketing teams have limited resources regarding time and budget.
Before launching your campaign, make sure you're thinking about messaging, the value you're providing, and the best channels to use.
Taking a moment to think about your audience can help make decisions around marketing channels, messaging, and creative assets much clearer.
If, for example, your audience is professionals in their 50's, you probably won't want to spend your time creating TikTok content. You may, however, want to spend some time looking into LinkedIn.
Not quite sure what channels to prioritize to help move your business forward? This article covers a Digital Marketing SWOT and provides free worksheets for determining your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, so you can better decide where to invest your time and resources.
Make sure to measure your marketing
As with any marketing, be it your website or social media campaigns, make sure you have measurement tools like Google Analytics installed to get a clear sense of what is working and where there are opportunities for improvement
Google analytics provides a snippet of tracking code you add to your website. Once installed, you can learn where your search traffic is coming from, pages where engagement is strong, and pages that need a little help. You also get a sense of how people move through your website.
Several tools you may choose to use also come with built-in analytics and data. Remember you want to access and examine in-app analytics and website/landing page analytics. For example, while it's valuable to know how many people clicked on an ad, you also want access to how long they stayed on your website and how those ads contributed to your business success (such as a download, phone call, or sale.)
To get started with key marketing metrics, visit this article on digital marketing measurement.
Ready to learn more? Get started with my how-to guide for growing your new business online.
