Reaching the right people.

The secret of good marketing is a firm grasp on your audience. A good thing to remember is that not all advertising is equal exposure.

If you are selling industrial products, you probably don’t want to buy commercial time during shows for young teenagers. You will get a lot more traction if you play your advertisement during a show more appropriate to your audience, like an evening news show. If you don’t know who your audience is, these kinds of mistakes might define your marketing strategy.

Fortunately, these faux pas can be avoided through persona development. At MVP we target just a few personas, or specific audiences, but they are all clearly defined so that our marketing is more effective. We assign a name, photo, characteristics, buying habits, etc. to each of our personas.

Identify your audience.

The first step to developing your personas might be one of the hardest. You can’t sell to everyone. Identifying your audience means you need to narrow down who you sell to, to those who are most likely to be attracted to and purchase your product or service. Refusing to narrow your audiences and trying to reach everyone makes your messaging and marketing unclear.

You might have just 1 persona or 5, but your messaging and advertising should always have a distinct audience in mind.

Think about the person or people most likely to buy your product or service. As an industrial manufacturer, maybe you have two distinct groups you want to appeal to: distributors and direct consumers. Whoever they are, make sure you define your audience.

Define key characteristics.

Give each group a representative persona. Assign a name, age, and a photo to the personas and identify their pain points in the purchasing process.

In addition to these more obvious distinctions for the audiences, you should complete research that provides insight into where the person may work, what activities they would enjoy in their free time, and what kind of marketing they might consume.

Create a reference sheet and keep it handy.

Solidify the personas in your mind and for your marketing team with a sheet that you keep on hand to remind you of those you are targeting. Whenever you turn out a new piece of marketing collateral, consider how your personas might respond. If the piece isn’t on track, let it go and begin again. Better to have the right advertising, then to go ahead with something that won’t impact your audiences.

Keep track of the results.

Pay attention to the people who are responding to your marketing. Do they seem to be in line with the audience members you pegged as your primary personas? If not, readjust. Marketing is an ongoing process.

This suggestion and others are part of our new e-book, “An Introduction to Growth-Driven Design.” Click below to download the FREE e-book!