Why Every Marketing Strategy Should Include Brand Personas

Brand personas are essential to any marketing strategy, as they help to define your brand’s target audience and identify the best ways to reach them.

Plus, my clients LOVE THEM. Seriously, the #1 piece of feedback I get from clients after a strategy session is how helpful the brand personas are. Trust me, you're going to want to start including them in your strategy development!

So what is a brand persona?

Well, it's a visual depiction or profile of your ideal customer that includes key demographic and behavioral characteristics. Think: age, job title, personal story, goals, etc.

Including brand personas in your PR strategy can help you to better understand your customer’s needs, wants and motivations, so that you can tailor your messaging and reach them a way that's most meaningful to them.

I bet you're asking yourself: "how do I create a brand persona?"

Creating a brand persona requires a thorough understanding of your customer and their needs. First, you need to identify who your target customer is based on any data or existing customer information you may have.

You'll want to look at two categories of characteristics: demographic and psychographic. Demographic characteristics include things like age, gender, income level, location and education level, while psychographic characteristics dive into their lifestyle, hobbies, interests, values, opinions and beliefs.

Once you have identified the demographic and psychographic characteristics of your target customer(s), you can start to build out your brand persona(s). While there isn't a limit to how many brand personas you can create, I typically try to stick with 3-5 to start.

When creating a brand persona, you should include elements such as goals, pain points, interests and values. This will help you to better understand the customer and meet them where they are so you can actually create a connection with them on an emotional level.

Ok, you've created your first brand persona. Now what?

Once you have created your brand persona, you can use it to inform your marketing strategy. Your marketing and PR activities should then be tailored to meet the needs and interests of your customer so that you can build a strong connection with them.

For example, say you're a plant-based food brand and one of your ideal customers is a busy, health-conscious mom, you may want to focus your PR activities on promoting things like organic, easy-to-make meal kits or family-friendly recipes and may also want to target more family-friendly and/or health-conscious digital media outlets, podcasts and even mommy blogger/influencer collaborations.

Questions or thoughts? drop me a line and let's chat!