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We are all bombarded with multichannel media content on a 24/7 basis.
People are drowning in online news and social media and marketers are forever searching for new tools to cut through all this noise and make their communications stand out from their competition.
Marketing is no longer defined by B2B or B2C. New models of marketing are emerging at the speed of light, often underlined by one core theme: we need to market with real humans in mind. It’s all about people-to-people marketing nowadays.
One helpful approach we use is to develop a range of user personas or brand avatars for your company. These describe in great detail the exact type of person your product and service is aimed at.
Having strong avatars or user personas will shape your marketing content, targeting, what visual approach you use and what merchandise you commission to best show off your brand.
Creating avatars and user personas is not a one-off exercise. They should be reviewed, tested and updated on a regular basis. There are many sophisticated tools on the market to gather the data that will shape your user personas and brand avatars.
Whether you will engage an agency with this or use your internal data analyst, here are 7 tips to help you get started with building a powerful picture of your customers:
- Use every opportunity you have to meet with people who closely match your customers. This will allow you to quickly learn about their day-to-day lives. Talk to the people who serve your customers – their feedback is the most valuable.
- If you operate in the B2B space, use networking events and trade exhibitions to explore what your clients working lives are like and what challenges them. Brief your staff on the kind of feedback you’ll find helpful so that the right conversations take place and valuable insights are shared
– Do some of your research on social media, all channels offer a wealth of information:
- Everyone keeps their details on LinkedIn up to date as it is one of the biggest business networking channels. Look up your clients: what job titles do they have? What groups are they following? What are their special interests?
- If you can gain access to Twitter or Facebook handles, explore what your clients’ interests and likes are to better understand them as people and learn what motivates them.
– Utilise the rich customer data you already have at your fingertips – explore your CRM system and truly understand what the data is telling you.
- Recognise trends in the data: where are your customers based and how do they prefer to communicate with you?
- What problems do they use your services or product to solve?
– Explore how your clients consume their news, and ask what TV programmes do they like?
Another helpful way of boosting your personas and avatars are through customer surveys. Just ask them. You can include questions in your customer surveys to help you fill any gaps in your knowledge.
– Take time to make user personas and brand avatars personal:
- Give them a fictional name so that you truly see them as real people.
- Identify their age, family status, job, interests and even give them a face.
- Identify which social channels they use and why.
Once you have the avatar or user personas in place, don’t just file them away but keep them at the fore of every decision you make. Constantly ask yourself: what would they want to read? When do they want to read it? What information would be of value to them?
Include this valuable marketing information in creative briefs for your agencies, freelancers and in your induction packs – this will fuel your marketing effectiveness.
If you need a guiding hand with choosing the best promotional products for your brand avatar, give us a call on 020 8447 4690 to see how we can help.
