We often talk about online personas to help you with your digital marketing strategy. An online persona is based around your target audience. This fictitious character acts as a reminder of who you are talking to when you are marketing. Therefore, it helps you define key messages that really resonate with your prospects and help you retain customers.
Understanding your target audience is essential to increase your opportunities to sell your products or services. From our experience, creating an online persona is vital to run a successful digital marketing campaign.
Who is your target audience?
If you haven’t already got a defined target audience, you firstly need to remind yourself of who you are wanting your products and services to reach. Ask yourself some questions such as:
- Who does your company identify with? Analyse your data to work out who is taking up your services.
- Who are your long-standing customers?
- Is there a pattern of industry sector that they are from?
- Are the businesses you deal with mainly SME or large corporations?
- Are the individuals purchasing your products a particular age?
- Also think about location. Is your business focussed on servicing clients in a particular geographical area?
Steps to create an online persona
If you’re a small business, setting up a persona is something you can do yourself with a few simple steps. Equally, you can also work with your digital marketing agency to help create a character of your ideal customer. You may find that a quick brainstorm session with your agency or colleagues will get that character swiftly into shape.
These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to as part of your lead generation strategy to gain qualified leads. It helps to personalise campaigns and be targeted.
You need to consider a number of areas such as the character’s goals or challenges. If you start with their job role and then imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Questions to ask to help you build your persona include:
- What’s the person’s age?
- Where do they live?
- What’s their job role and sector they work in?
- Imagine their goals such as business growth, saving the business money or future promotion.
- Then imagine what challenges they face and create solutions around these.
Once you have this character created you should get a clearer idea of how your services or product can help them. Think about the solution you are offering them with your product or service and create a few buzzwords and one or two sentences around this solution you have to their problem or needs. This can then become one of your key messages in marketing.
Create a visual of your persona
We create a simple one slide PowerPoint visual once we have gathered all the facts about our persona.
Create bullet points that answer all your questions that offer a solution to their business problem or needs. This can then form key messages within your content marketing for ongoing digital marketing campaigns.
Finalise the visual with a clear box out which defines:
- How you help them
- The overarching marketing message of how your business helps them
- Your one-line elevator pitch
The reason we create this simple visual is that it’s then easy to share with sales and marketing colleagues; business development teams; design or digital marketing agencies. This helps you to maintain brand awareness and consistency of messaging. This then helps to build brand trust, loyalty and position you as a thought leader.
Digital marketing Croydon
So, with these few simple steps you can begin to get a feel for what makes your target audience tick, and what digital channels you would use to reap the best sales results and return on investment.
Get in touch with us at Smart Cow to discuss how a digital marketing campaign, tailored to your audience, can help your business.