Identifying Your Brand’s Audiences

After minutes of scrolling through your photo library, you finally got the perfect image selected. You’re fired up. Now it’s time to write a caption. But suddenly, you’re drawing blanks. Writer's block hits again.

While we haven’t found a cure-all for writer’s block, what we have found is knowing your brand voice and target persona helps make our communication strategy easier.

Target personas are crucial to marketing effectiveness. Nearly 80% of customers surveyed in one study said they are more likely to do business with a brand that offers personalized messaging and experience. In email marketing, personalized headlines and preview texts routinely outperform generic, standard brand messaging.

So how can you identify your brand’s target personas?
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1) Research your ideal customer
‍Start by doing a bit of digging into your industry, market, and ideal customers. This includes:
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Demographic information - such as age, location, gender, education level, etc.
Behaviors - purchasing behavior, preferred social platforms, how they routinely spend their time, etc.
Values and interests - identifying what is important to them as individuals, what they aspire towards, what they enjoy, and what they find represents them well.
Pain points and challenges - what are the hassles and inconveniences that bother them or stop them from achieving their goals?

2) Look At Your Existing Customers

Look at your existing customers to understand who is already looking at your brand’s products or services.

Online analytics – looking at customer behaviors on your website, emails, and social media feeds can give valuable insights into your target personas.
Survey forms – asking questions through a survey is always a great way to gain valuable insights from your customers directly. Create an incentive to drive more participation and engagement.
Focus groups – invest the time in organizing focus groups with engaged customers or clients. This can offer valuable insights and also a chance for more answers to come out, as ideas can spark amongst participants.

3) Study other brands
Whether it’s in your market or an entirely different industry, look closely at who is engaging with a targeted brand online.

Social media engagement – look at who is actively commenting, sharing, or engaging with those brands online.
Influencers and creatives – look closely at who those brands are working with and what they represent about the brand’s target personas and audiences.

When you have all this information collected, it’s time to create a person. Yep, an actual person. We go as far as to put a name and face to the person. With that visual created, list out all the identifiers of what makes them tick. Their personality, what a day in the life looks like, what they’re passionate about, what their goals are, and what their challenges and pain points are. Next, answer how your business helps them alleviate pain points, achieve their goals, and connect with their passions and interests.

Remember, brands can have multiple customer personas. In fact, we encourage it to help personalize those messages going out on social media and through your emails. This can be based on purchasing behavior or who your product and services are aimed at.
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Taking the time to lay this foundation for your brand’s communication and marketing strategy is a great way to help drive better results with your efforts. So grab a coffee and sit down with your team. It’s time to meet your brand’s new friends.

And if you want some extra help from a team that does this regularly, we are more than happy to sit down with you.

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