Defining your audience can be a painful process. Too often it feels as thought defining an audience means reducing potential market size and ultimately limiting business growth. But developing brand personas does the opposite.
Instead of limiting your audience, when you create and use brand personas correctly, you get more insights that will not only resonate with your audience but also help you expand your business operations into markets you’ve may not have considered. By distinguishing specific personas your messaging becomes more spefic, impactful, and engaging.
Here, we’ll share our experience from creating hundreds of personas, using them in brand development and market positioning, and help you get the most out of your brand personas.
What is a Brand Persona?
A brand persona is a generalized biography that gives you insights into your customers ranging from ideal clients to messaging opponent—they can be key decision makers, mothers with young kids, labor workers with a night shift, and more.
These fake people act as placeholders for your audience in a more specific definition. Instead of creating a brand or company messaging to a void of a million people, you can use a brand persona. Personas help you think more specifically about strategic business decisions and who you’re speaking to in your messaging.
For example, your brand messaging might look different for a 22-year-old female nursing student compared to a 63-year-old optometrist who loves fly fishing (ie. my dad).
What Makes a Good Brand Persona?
1. They’re Relatable and Knowable
Perhaps the most important part of a good brand persona is that you can know them. The point isn’t to set out and create personas of people that couldn’t or wouldn’t exist, nor of people that would never come to mind. Brand personas need to be relatable to company leadership and knowable by everyone at the company. This lets everyone get on the same page when it comes to using personas.
2. They Give You Insights You Otherwise Wouldn’t Have
Brand personas help build out a mental picture surrounding any business issue. If you develop 12 personas who are all too similar, then using them won’t be effective—they’lll have the same problems and fears that they solve the same way. Uninspired. Make sure your personas come from different walks of life so that you can empathize with and learn something from each.
3. You Can Easily Recall Them
Great brand personas come up in every creative meeting. They’re like people you’re looking out for, learning from, and taking into consideration when you’re making big decisions or tiny adjustments. If your brand personas are so complicated that you can’t recall them, or there are so many that you’re not sure who fits into a situation, then it’s worth going back to the drawing board.
4. Brand Personas Useful
Having a brand persona that represents everyone in your weekly meeting is useless—those people are already advocating for themselves and people like them. Instead, make sure that your personas are going to give you a different perspective, different goal, and different issue to overcome. Through a breadth of useful personas, you can develop the best product, service, and brand.
With these four elements in mind, we have simplified our process and template to help you create brand personas that are practical and relevant to your business. Oh, and as far as complexity goes: one piece of paper or a single slide is a good goal. And don’t use tiny fonts.
Why Does Using Personas Matter?
It’s our tendency to create messaging that we resonate with, but that’s not always what our customers need. Brand personas help us understand other people.
1. Identify the Right Message
The main reason for using personas is to identify and articulate your message. Too often business owners have something that they want to tell people because they have a new product, new way of doing something, and are passionate about their solution, but their audience doesn’t want to hear it. Using brand personas helps you understand what message will resonate with your audience.
2. Communicate Your Brand Best
Once you know what your audience will listen to and what they want to hear, you’re on the path to powerful brand communication. When you understand what you want to communicate and the way that your audience will best receive your message, your brand message will be unstoppable.
3. Target the Best Platforms.
No more shouting to an empty void. When you know who you’re talking to and how to call them out, you make better use of your messaging dollars which ultimately improves your ROI. A persona takes you from a scenario where you’re shouting, “Hey you!” in a room full of 100 people to one where you’re shouting “Hey Jim! Yes, the one who likes to run!” which is much more targeted.
The better you can tailor your content—both in subject matter and format–the easier it will be to grab and keep people’s attention.
4. Increase Engagement.
When you know what platforms your brand personas prefer, you can tell a consistent story across those platforms to build a stronger relationship and (hopefully) convert people more easily. Every platform of communication has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and knowing those along with what your audience wants to hear can amplify your effort in your brand content.
In short, knowing where your brand personas “live” ensures the branding work you do will actually pay off.
How to Create Personas
To create personas, you need to document the key attributes relevant to the individual, such as:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Marital/Family Status
- Job title, type of work, Salary
- Story and Background
- Brand Quotient
At its core, a brand persona is someone you can recall and use to inform your brand decisions ranging from product expansion to marketing communications. So, when you create a persona, include the details that are relevant to your brand, give you audience insight, and help you remember the persona.
Pro-Tip: Download our free brand personas template, and follow our step-by-step guide to create personas that work!
How to Put Your Brand Personas to Work
Now that you have created your brand personas, its time to put them to work. There are a few key points to remember when it comes time to use personas.
Practice Empathy During Brainstorming.
First, part of developing personas is inherently stereotyping. While that’s a great place to start with a persona, be sure to personify each persona—make them a real person in your mind. Include details about their life, their desires, fears, and their humanity. Developing personas that are as robust as actual people makes them a key part of your brand strategy.
Create a Consistent Narrative.
Once you’ve developed your personas, keep them consistent in how they’d act, what they’d choose, and how they’d interact with your brand. It can be tempting to bend personas to what you want to do with your brand, but if your personas wouldn’t like it, neither will your audience.
Bring them Along
Brand personas are something you can focus on in a weekly meeting by talking through scenarios, thinking about how that customer will respond to your brand, or even trying to make your product better for them. But they can also be something that makes an appearance in other major meetings and talks. When brainstorming a brand pivot, adding a service, or removing some features, ask yourself what each persona will think and react. By bringing personas along with you, you can foresee issues you might run into with your actual audience.
Grow with Your Personas
By using your persona consistently, you will naturally fill out their characteristics and help make them familiar to your other team members. Eventually, your personas will grow and become a part of your team.
5 Persona Building Pro Tips
After making hundreds of personas for localized brands and global brands alike, we’ve picked up a few pro-tips that take personas to the next level and make them even more effective.
- Base them on someone you know. It’s easiest to build a stereotype in a loving way based on someone you know—you know their tendancies, what the prefer, and can hold them in your mind. If you have a type A person in your life, use them.
- Put some in relationship. Family and friend dynamics are a strong force in decision-making, so don’t be afraid to put some personas in relationship with one another. For example, when working with BMW, we developed a persona that was a stereotypical BMW owner as well as his son in order to think better about how the brand will connect to the next generation, what new drivers will want, and how current owners will hand off the keys to the next generation (literally and figuratively).
- Have one that’s perfect, and one that’s anti. It’s easiest to build a persona that is an ideal client—but that only tells half the story. Your second persona should be your anti-customer. By building and understanding your anti-customer, you might get more of an idea about what’s offputing about your brand.
- The insights are on the outskirts. Like all of popular culture, what’s in style now started in the underground—use personas in the same way. Don’t create 4 ideal clients, but a breadth of personas with different experiences, goals, and obstacles in order to best inform your brand strategy.
- Create them for each branch/offering. If your brand offers more than one service or product, think about crafting different personas for each (within reason). A colorful palette of personas helps you paint the best picture of your brand. When you add a new product or service, you might add one more persona to your suite to help you think about your relative brand messaging.
If you are still struggling to achieve the desired results, consider bringing in expert help. If you are searching for the right partner, check out our tips to find an agency, peruse our case studies, or contact us directly.