Every brand talks to someone.
As a business owner, you already know who that someone is, even if you haven’t put it into words yet. The reason your brand exists, the purpose that carries it, has to do with that someone that it’s speaking to, no matter who that someone is – whether it’s communicating with a younger audience and waiting for them to come into their own enough to purchase, or attracting the specific kind of niche that the products and services you offer deal with, your brand speaks for a reason.
The people that listen are your audience, your potential customer, the people that keep your brand in business.
Understanding who these people are is vital. A mismatch between your brand or product and the way your brand speaks is a problem; a mismatch between your brand and who it’s speaking to is an even bigger problem. Without someone listening at the end of your marketing, you’ll be speaking to no one. With no one listening, your brand’s in stasis. When your brand is in stasis, it doesn’t adapt or grow.
And when your brand doesn’t grow, your brand doesn’t survive.
When you create marketing personas, you’re creating who your brand is speaking to so it can survive and grow. These personas are your audience: the people that frequent your brand the most.
Here’s how to build personas that you can market to.
1. Talk to people.
Your brand already has the audience in mind. Now you need to talk to them so you can see what they’re really like. Surveys, studies, product research, reaching out to members of your audience to find out what they’re like – it’s all information you can use, and more importantly, information you can adapt. If you have a dedicated audience already, great: use it. If not, it’s time to go digging into where your brand lives to see who’s using your products or services most often.
2. Examine who reaches out to you first.
Chances are, there have been people who’ve reached out to you before you’ve reached out to them, and that kind of cold outreach is critical to understanding both who’s most interested in your products and what led them to reach out to you in the first place. Talk to your sales team, go through your inbox, find out where the leads are coming from. Are they finding you on Google? Do they just see your ads on billboards? Where are they going when they do? Once you have those answers, you’ll have an idea of where your brand exists relative to your audience’s lives.
3. Know what kind of persona won’t go for your services.
Just as there’s a perfect persona that will reach out to you and be happy with your products, there’s audiences out there who will never use your business, and that’s fine – but you still need to know who those audiences are. Knowing what doesn’t, and who isn’t, interested in your products works the same as knowing who is: it’ll give you the context that your brand exists in.
Your brand exists because it talks to other people and it listens. Knowing who those people are, and being able to adapt to the changing audiences as you go, is critical to growing and adapting your brand to new challenges, and if you need help figuring out the how and why, we’re happy to guide you through it.
