Audience Personas and How They Help Your Sales Team Communicate Effectively
Customers expect to be treated as individuals. They want to buy from brands who get them, who understand who they are, what they need, and what they want. In fact, they expect it. If you want to really understand and address your customers’ needs, improve communication, and refine marketing efforts, it is crucial to develop audience personas. However, the impact goes beyond that – your sales team’s success depends on it. Why?
Through personalized marketing strategies that get results, audience personas help your sales team better target their efforts, develop the right types of messaging and make informed marketing decisions, ultimately leading to improved client engagement and conversions.
Who is your customer, really? Let’s take a look at the definition of an audience persona, why you need one and dive into the whole persona creation process.
Who is Your Customer, Really? What is an Audience Persona?
An audience persona is based on someone who best represents a business’s target audience. This fictional character is based on data-driven research and includes detailed information about someone who represents your ideal target audience. This is not a real customer, but a fictional character who embodies the traits of your best potential customers. Determining buyer personas helps businesses understand and empathize with their customers so they can do a better job of acquiring and serving them.
It is sometimes also known as a buyer persona, customer persona, or customer profiling.
OK Then, What Information Do I Need to Create an Audience Persona?
Think of all the traits that make your customers who they are. List it out. Where do they live, how old are they, what is their income? How about their hobbies, their habits, their goals? Are they married? Do they have kids? Where do they spend their time online? Offline? What gets them excited? What makes them frustrated? Dig into their feelings; get into their headspace.
These are your customers, your fanbase. It’s time to put them in the spotlight.
Gather the data, conduct the surveys, and analyze the insights. Consider it all during your creation process. A target audience analysis may include geographic, demographic, and financial information, as well as behaviors, pain points, and buying patterns.
What is important to them when considering a brand? All of this information helps your business connect with customers on a deeper level.
Then, give this character a name and even a face (you can use stock photography or an illustration) to make the character come to life.
This sets the stage perfectly for understanding why audience personas are incredibly important for brands. This will also personalize the character you’ve created.
Why Are Audience Personas Important?
Imagine you’re a rockstar performing to a snoozing crowd of people who don’t care about your music. You’re playing to empty stares and deaf ears. Sounds nauseating, doesn’t it? The same applies to your marketing efforts. Without persona-driven marketing campaigns, your message will fail to strike a chord with your audience. You risk delivering your message to an audience who could care less about what you have to offer.
Positioning your product or service with the right personas in mind is much more likely to reach and resonate with the right individuals. That can be tricky, though, as many brands often target a range of potential markets. Chances are, your target audience is made up of a variety of groups so one persona won’t do the trick to summarize everyone.
Therefore, you will need to create multiple audience personas.
Why Do I Need Multiple Audience Personas?
So, now, let’s say you’re an innovative packaging company that is looking at what copy or creative you should be including on a new online marketing initiative. Your most active customer, for example, could be Kathryn, 35 years old, a VP of E-commerce Supply Chain. She is a millennial, married with two kids and strongly respects brands she can trust. Kathryn may be concerned about finding a packaging partner who is responsive and able to meet the needs of the company. But, you might also have Melissa, a VP of Marketing High-End Consumer Goods looking for a new packaging partner that meets all of her requirements. She is a boomer who travels frequently but is getting frustrated with the process. Despite her angst, Melissa may also be feeling excited about the prospect of finding a new packaging partner who can make her product look amazing.
By visualizing and understanding audience personas like Kathryn and Melissa, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to resonate with their preferences, address pain points, and effectively communicate the value of their products or services.
Keep in mind, though, that these are two completely different personas most likely won’t respond to the same types of marketing campaigns.
Keep Refining the Persona Creation Process
The persona creation process is not a one-and-done project. Just as key market drivers and industry trends evolve, so must persona research. You must constantly refresh data analysis to keep personas up to date. Diligence here will keep your sales communication strategy dynamic and effective.
Just as your products and services change, so do your target audiences.
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Where to Now? A Business Breakthrough
Understanding the different audience personas is crucial for businesses because it allows them to tailor their marketing campaigns and messages effectively, recognizing that two completely different personas are unlikely to respond to the same approach.
But now that you’ve created multiple audience personas, what’s next? You need to strategize a tactical marketing plan with actionable output to move your business forward. In other words, you need a Business Breakthrough Bootcamp.
Bring in the SWOT Team
Through our Business Breakthrough Bootcamps, the team at CMDS uses a SWOT analysis to help you identify internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats. By doing so, we can collaboratively create a comprehensive strategic plan, taking your audience personas into careful consideration, to cater to your short and long-term business goals.
A SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool used by many successful businesses to reveal what they’re good at (strengths) and where they need to improve (weaknesses). Plus, it allows for a full-picture view of the business (detailing opportunities and potential threats), so better decisions can be made for the future.
Here’s what you need to know about SWOT Analysis:
Strengths
Strengths are the attributes within an organization that are considered to be necessary for the ultimate success of a project. Strengths are resources and capabilities that can be used for competitive advantage and should be woven throughout your brand messaging to reach and connect with the right audience.
Think: Offer truly custom and unique solutions. Not limited to one format or one possibility.
Weaknesses
Weaknesses include internal roadblocks. Weaknesses can derail growth and change before it even begins.
Think: Lack of consistent communication with clients after sale to follow up or grow business
Opportunities
Opportunities refer to favorable external factors that could give an organization a competitive advantage. For example, if there is room for company growth, service offering, etc.
Think: Working on the business, clearly defining the pathways to future strategies, and then executing in an organized way.
Threats
Different from weaknesses, threats are any external circumstance that may prohibit growth or achievement. Knowing what these threats are, and what your competitors are offering to your audience persona can help to make products, services, and marketing stand out from the crowd. While they are usually out of your control, this knowledge can be used to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses and improve business performance.
Think: Your competitors are starting to catch up and might pose a threat through their potential actions.
Off the Charts: 1% Growth Opportunities with CMDS Breakthrough Activation Program
Growth opportunities can be found in various areas of your business, you just need to know where to look. CMDS provides ongoing personalized breakthrough activation consulting to help businesses focus on pillars of business growth. Within all of these pillars reside 50 levers. Each lever represents an opportunity to see at least 1% growth for a business. Most businesses are only leveraging 3-5 of these unique opportunities, purely because they don’t know about them or don’t have a strategy in place to execute.
That’s where we come in. Imagine what your operations and marketing could do if your mission and values were at the core of it. Everything is in perfect alignment; in sync. We’re here to make that vision a reality.
Don’t let your marketing message fall on deaf ears.
Are you ready to step into the spotlight…or rather, put the right audience in the spotlight?! Get actionable output to move your business forward today.