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Building a brand persona: marketing with a focus on people

Your company wants to reach the largest possible audience. For the more fans, the more successful the brand. But you can only turn people into fans if your service or product meets their needs. So you shouldn't try to reach everyone. You need to focus on your target audience. To do so, you need a brand story, a brand strategy, a brand identity, and a brand personality. But only by building a brand persona you can make the resulting actions specific enough to be successful.

Truly successful marketing efforts (such as a marketing strategy and a marketing campaign) are entirely focused on a person: your ideal customer. The question is, how to build a brand persona and use it to connect with your audience?

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Who is your brand persona?

If you haphazardly create a brand persona for every nook and cranny of the marketplace, you probably won't accomplish much. To make your efforts succeed, you should do something that goes against the average entrepreneur's instincts: delineate your target audience.

You can do so by defining your minimum viable audience (MVA) — the smallest possible audience that keeps you in business.

Why? This is a group of people who really need your product or service. By building a brand persona based on them, you can be extremely relevant to them. That's how you create fans who are eager to tell others about your brand.

Creating a brand persona that works: don't think like a marketer and familiarize yourself with your audience

Once you understand what a brand persona can do for you, it's tempting to develop one as quickly as possible. So when it comes to mapping out your target audience for (online) marketing purposes (such as lead generation to grow your business), it may be tempting to peruse some brand persona examples and complete a persona template based on your vision and preferences. But, to paraphrase Abraham Maslow, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In other words, you can't ‘make up’ your ideal customer. You need to find, research, and outline them, which you can do in three steps:

Organize interviews or focus groups

Validate your hypotheses through research

Research the market and perform statistical analysis

How to create a brand persona?

1

Research your potential customer's (personal) background

A common mistake is to create brand personas with insufficient evidence. If you want to achieve your brand and marketing goals, you should try to fathom your persona's needs through thorough research.

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Be critical when creating brand personas

Above we wrote that it's best to delineate your target audience. You can, however, have two, three, or four brand personas. They'll develop as your organization evolves. That's completely fine, as long as you calculate the percentage of your customer base a brand persona represents or should represent. That's how you'll know if a persona is necessary.

3

Describe your ideal customer in a concise, powerful persona template

Once you're in the process of mapping out your brand persona's needs and challenges, you may want to write down all your findings. You should resist this tendency and create a clear, visually appealing, one-page description of your persona which all stakeholders can easily use on a daily basis.

Developing your brand persona: practical tips

Paint a complete picture of your brand persona by mapping out things like behavior, personality traits, and demographics. Talk to existing customers to empathize with your brand persona's gain and pain points. Be sure to also create an anti-persona: the person in the buyer's environment who influences the buying process. Or, request a free brand brainstorming session with our brand specialists. Together, we will have a look at your brand and audience, and we'll discuss how you can create real fans.

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How to create personas?