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Understanding Your Target Audience: Importance of Customer Personas in Marketing
Date: MARCH 8, 2023 • CATEGORY: BRANDING
5 mins read
There is a saying that states “Customers are always right”. But how will you know if the customer you’re selling your product to is the right audience for you? In order to find the perfect target audience, you need to consider the primary purpose of your product, what are the characteristics of the person that you have in mind when creating your brand.
So, the big question is, do you know your buyer’s persona? If so, how much do you know about them?
Every business will not thrive nor even survive if not for its customers. There’s a saying that ‘customers are always right’ - and yes, that is the key for your business to survive by prioritizing your customers and giving them what they want and need. You need to be a brand that will serve as the solution to your customer's pain points, in order for them to give their trust and loyalty to you.
But, how do you prioritize them if you do not know something about them? That is the main reason why knowing your customer’s persona is essential in building your branding. Read on and find out all about customer persona in this week’s blog!
What do we mean by Customer Persona?
Source: Mailchimp
A customer persona is a semi-fictional character that marketers create to describe or represent a specific type of customer. Creating customer personas are beneficial for businesses as it will bring life to customer segmentation which only consists of general information like demographic, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.
This will allow brands to deeper understand different groups of customers and recognize their key characteristics. Personas are semi-fictional representations of a business's ideal customer based on research and analysis - this helps them build a detailed picture of them including their emotive information such as their buying behavior, personal motivations, frustrations, what they value in a brand, and the communication they prefer.
Crafting a customer persona helps brands know their customers better - making it easy to tailor content, message, product, and services to meet the specific needs of their target audience.
Let’s Talk about Empathy Mapping
Source: Adobe XD
One way to understand your customer’s needs is to step into their shoes. But, this is a hard thing to do and a difficult perspective to sustain.
Empathy mapping is the key to maintaining this perspective - which can help brands visualize what their customers are seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking. Basically, it can disclose less tangible insights like opportunities for communication and challenges that come along the customer's journey.
This will serve as a guide in getting inside a consumer’s head. An empathy map is an easy-to-digest visual and a useful tool for helping brands better understand their customer’s behaviors and attitudes. A simple workshop activity that can be done in various fields like marketing, sales, product development, stakeholders, and creative teams for building empathy for end users.
Choosing the right target audience requires understanding the true purpose of your brand and what pain points is it trying to solve. Creating an effective solution for your audience means digging deeper into the current problems that they are experiencing.
Negative does not automatically mean wrong
If you already established your ideal customer persona - it is also important to build a ‘negative’ persona that can help you avoid wasting budget and resources on the wrong target market. This is basically avoiding the kind of person that brands don’t want to encounter and be a customer but can turn the table around if handled effectively.
We’ve jotted down a list of characteristics of a negative persona for you to take note of:
😓 People who are too pessimistic
These are the types of people who always thinks negatively. “That product won’t work” “It’s just like the other brand” “that’s too expensive” “that won’t work on me”. Instead of abandoning these kinds of customers, turn their pessimistic mindset into a positive one by making them realize the importance and quality of your product/service in their life.
🤨 People who have unrealistic expectations
These people often have the highest standards when it comes to purchasing goods and services. They tend to make unrealistic expectations in regards to quality, pricing, features, etc,. To reach their ceiling high assumptions, provide them with realistic approach in a way that they will realize the worth of your brand.
❌ Abandons purchases
There are various reasons why customers abandon their purchases. Either they can’t find a convenient payment method, additional costs, complicated checkout process, etc,. What you can do to avoid these from happening? Make an irresistible offer that they can’t resist, enhance the quality of your website, include a flexible payment method, and the most important of all, execute a marketing strategy that will make them buy!
🤑 Has high acquisition cost
Basically, these are the types of customers that brands will get a hard time to reach or else their business will not be viable, customer acquisition cost should not be higher than the customer lifetime value.
🤖 Professionals who are too advanced for your product or service
These are the “advance mag-isip” kind of people who are too futuristic even in their life choices. They tend to shrug off products that are too outdated for their perspective.
Recognizing these types of negative persona early on will help businesses craft their marketing messages properly and sharpen their communication to target worthwhile customers.
Putting comprehension into action
Here are a few key takeaways of how you will turn your insights into strategic actions:
- Focus on where customers mostly spend their time – information like do people spend most of their time on Facebook or Instagram can help brands execute their marketing and advertising plans correctly.
- Speak their language – know if the customers use slang, emojis, colloquial words, or hashtags, and take this as a consideration to help your brand formulate your communication style that will replicate their way of speaking.
- Creating persona-specific content – customer personas help inform what kind of content should be created rather than doing it for a specific segment. Also, it is important to know what the customer cares about to discover what else they might want to hear about.
- Partner with people your personas love – work or partner with companies or influencers that will appeal to the customers – in this way, brands will be spending their time and budget wisely. This also prevents misjudging and potential damage to brand associations.
