Your market cannot be everyone and anyone. It’s something any marketing textbook will tell you. The more specific and narrowed in your market, the better and more effective your marketing efforts. While it’s helpful to segment your ideal audience by industry, product/service need, and location, and your target decision makers by items such as location, age, role, and communication preferences, it’s even better to take things a step further and create brand personas for your organization.
What is a Brand Persona?
A brand persona is a collection of personality traits, attitudes and values that your brand showcases on a regular basis to help connect with a certain audience segment. A brand persona can be a person, character, mascot, or idea.
Here is an example of a brand persona created for an ideal target audience:
It’s important to note that you can have more than one brand persona for your product or service, however, your efforts and marketing should specifically cater to each segment versus using a one-size fits all approach.
How To Build Your Brand Persona
There are a few key considerations when building your brand persona(s).
Individual Characteristics include:
- Age
- Role
- Hobbies/Interests
- Memberships/Associations
- Dreams: what do they really want?
- Fears: what keeps them up at night?
- Pains: what is frustrating them?
Organizational Characteristics include:
- Total revenue
- Number of employees
- Industry/sector
- Memberships/Associations
- Dreams: what does the organization really want?
- Fears: what keeps them up at night?
- Pain: what is frustrating them?
If you are looking for specific research to support your creation of brand personas, Environics Analytics has helpful tools to support your market segmentation efforts. One tool in particular, the PRIZM5 Lookup allows users to search what types of segments live within specific postal codes across Canada. Which is a particularly useful tool for those selling direct to consumers.
How to Integrate Your Persona into Your Marketing Plan
Once your brand persona(s) have been created, it’s time to put your research into action. By developing detailed target audiences, you will need to take things a step further and create detailed marketing strategies to reach each persona.
For example, if you know that your main brand persona is 55+ years old and prefers reading the newspaper, Instagram is probably not the best marketing tactic to get their attention and vice versa. If your brand persona is younger and makes their buying decisions off of what they view on social media, newspaper or TV advertising is likely going to be a flop.
What it comes down to is knowing your audience. By being clear and taking the time to define who your target audiences are with brand personas, you personalize your organization’s marketing experience. Any marketing-related decision your team makes should have your brand persona in mind. If you know that Mary (our brand persona listed above) is a regular attendee of chamber of commerce events, perhaps you look at sponsoring the next event or sending your employees to represent your company.
Is your organization ready to re-evaluate your marketing strategy? Connect with Incite today to learn about how we can support your efforts.
About The Author
As Founder and President of Incite, Ted brings over 25 years of strategic marketing and consulting experience to the table. His proven ability to engage in complex business strategy and multi-stakeholder environments has enabled him to help a diverse range of private and public sector clients with growth strategy, communications, strategic issues management and brand development.
About Incite
Incite is a marketing and strategy consulting firm specializing in growth, brand, and communications. From market expansion and brand development, to supporting post-merger integration and building internal engagement, Incite’s strategic approach helps clients to better understand their market, clearly articulate value, align organizational resources, and connect with key stakeholders to achieve success
