A key factor in devising a successful digital marketing strategy is tailoring your message to hit exactly the right sweet spot in your target market. Developing a clear customer persona, or personas, will help you to talk to your target customers in the right language about solving their particular problems. This is the way they find you online.
The best digital marketers all use customer personas. These are fairly in-depth descriptions of people who figure in your target audience. While you can use real customers as examples to distinguish who your buyer personas represent, the personas themselves should be totally fictitious. But if you give them a name, a demographic and some behaviour patterns, you’ll form a much better picture of who you are talking to, what their problems are and where their pain points exist.
By talking to your persona or personas (as there may be more than one) it helps you to fashion a message that is aimed directly at them and develop products and services that meet their needs. This is an essential exercise that will help to clarify and crystallise the exact nature and characteristics of your target market so that they permeate the thought process within your entire organisation. This helps ensure that your whole operation is dedicated to meeting their needs whether they are customers or prospects.
Like a mission statement or a company vision, your customer persona or personas should not therefore be confined to the marketing department. By communicating throughout the organisation, the correct message will come through from all departments. From customer service to accounts through to operations, done correctly, there will be a subconscious desire to talk in the right way to the right people.
Having run your business successfully, you probably have a fairly clear picture in your mind as to what your target customers look like. But creating your personas will help to clarify the vision in your mind. There are plenty of helpful websites out there and free templates to help you with the process but here’s one from Hootsuite to help get you going.