I Have Marketing Personas, Now What?

Marketing personas provide value to you as the business owner in understanding the motivations and buying patterns of your best customers. If the concept of a Persona is new to you, back up and read the previous blog post on why you need a Marketing Persona. If you have already gone through the effort of building marketing personas for your business, keep reading to find out the best way to leverage this valuable data for business decision-making.

How Do I Use My Marketing Personas?

To see persona-driven marketing in action, let’s imagine a marketing campaign for a garden center. We’ll start with a basic ad meant to cast a wide net.

Basic Customer Demographics:

• Women in the age range of 34 – 55
• Suburban household with an income range of $50,000 – $150,000
• An occasional customer interested in spring and fall annuals and perennials totaling $100 a visit

It’s likely that your advertisements to this demographic group will be general in scope. Without personas, businesses tend to opt for all-purpose marketing pitches that would appeal to a broad audience. In theory, advertising to a wide market means there is a better chance that more customers will see the ad and visit the store. An ad built from just these demographics might highlight a plant sale on spring annuals in May.

While general promotions have an important place in the ad budget, they may not be reaching your most profitable customers. Now imagine the garden center has built a persona based on customer data and insights, and they want to target that persona.

Persona Insight:

Jane is a 52-year-old accountant who lives in the Philadelphia, PA suburb of Skippack. Her three-bedroom home is four miles from the nursery location. Her two children are a high-school student and a college student, both living at home. Because her kids are mostly grown, Jane has far more free time for herself than in previous years. She has always enjoyed gardening, and now she spends most of her weekend time working in her yard. Jane loves perennials and easy-maintenance plants. She has always wanted a large vegetable garden but feels intimidated by the idea of starting one from scratch, and she worries about the constant upkeep.

With the specific persona in mind, we are marketing directly to Jane. These ads will be much more explicit, and the business can create more content around Jane’s interests. Marketing content about upcoming vegetable garden workshops, vegetable plant sales, or even a special offer to custom build a raised garden bed is likely to resonate with her. This content will generate a deeper customer connection and more revenue through higher profit margin classes and services.

Marketing to a persona makes it easier to design promotions and ads that catch the interest of a specific ideal customer. Jane’s motivations and priorities are crystal clear to the garden center. So if they set out to meet her needs in their marketing, she is more likely to spend her money with them rather than a competitor.

What Else Can I Do With Marketing Personas?

Not ALL of your best customers will be encapsulated into one persona, but the similarities and messaging options will echo far beyond a few individuals. And what’s interesting is that many others in the customer base likely have the same motivations and concerns that Jane does, even if they do not have exactly the same background. The messaging will resonate with anyone who is looking to increase their gardening know-how or who is planning a vegetable garden of their own.

The value of marketing personas goes beyond choosing promotions. Personas can help to generate valuable new content, inspire social media posts and ad material, improve pay-per-click ads, and even guide training on how the customer service team should interact with customers. For more examples of how to use Marketing Personas, read Why Do Marketing Personas Work?

Detailed marketing personas are often an overlooked part of a marketing strategy. But they are worth the time and effort. Personas provide audience insight, stronger messaging options, and more effective ad spend. Once you develop a campaign directed at the persona you’ve developed with accurate data, you’ll see a measurable difference in audience response.