Marketing Personas: When Having Multiple Personalities Is a Good Thing

In marketing, having multiple personalities is a very good thing.  It’s something we strive for, in fact.  That’s because in order to properly market your company’s products and/or services, you need to know exactly who your target client is, how to reach them, and how to sell to them.  One of the best ways to figure this out is to create personas.  After all, your ideal clients are people with likes, dislikes, needs, wants, various moods, and different personalities.  The more you know about them, the more you can define and refine your marketing plan and better leverage your outbound and inbound marketing efforts.

hermannyin/Flickr

There’s a lot out there on the internet about creating personas.  Google “marketing personas” and you’ll see for yourself.  (Of course, there are articles and blog posts on whether or not you even need to create personas to put together an effective marketing strategy, but that’s a different blog post.)  Putting together personas is a fun exercise, especially when you need a break from doing whatever it is you do.  After a year or two in business, you should have a fairly good idea as to who your ideal clients are.  Like many things in life, it’s better to commit those ideas to paper. 

Seven  Steps to Creating Personas

Because I like examples of things, I am going to use a bike shop owner as an example of how he can create personas.

1. Segment your personas.  As owner of a bike shop, you have a huge variety of clients.  Serious road cyclists are different from both casual let’s-go-for-a-bike-ride-and-have-a-picnic cyclists and adrenaline-seeking mountain bikers.  The road cyclists can be broken down further: do they compete, or is this just their favorite form of exercise?  Again, they can be broken down further by gender.
2. Demographics and lifestyle factors.  This part includes education level, white or blue collar, income level, marital status, kids or no kids, other sports they participate in, do they ride their bike to work, do they take their bike with them on vacation, do they read cycling magazines, etc.  You can get really detailed! 
3. Emotional details.  This is more about the cyclists’ personality: likes, dislikes, goals, disposition, etc.
4. Relationship to cycling and your shop.  Look at the relationship your personas have with your shop and with competitors’ shops.  How much do they know about your industry, bicycles, bike gear, bike racks, racing and competitions?  Are they long-term customers, or do they buy the bike and disappear?
5. You are the solution.  Your marketing efforts should consistently focus on how you help your clients. Make a list of what problems your products and services solve for your customers.
6. The Big Sale.  Now think about how you close a sale with your various personas. Think about the benefits and disadvantages they have to shopping with you.  How are the various products and services you offer going to affect them and, by extension, you?  Figure out the words and phrases your personas use, and use them in your pitch.
7. Name your personas.  This makes your personas human, prevents confusion, and keeps them distinct from one another.

 Now that you know who you are marketing and selling to, time to update your marketing plan!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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