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Blasting the same content to everyone, in a generic tone, won’t get the same results as tailoring your message.Knowing what your audience is interested in hearing about will help you to tailor campaigns to meet their needs (and not just your sales targets).
A great way to start tailoring content that speaks to your recipients, or ‘hails’ their interest, is to use personas.A marketing persona is a fictional representation of your typical customer, encompassing the important characteristics that make up your customers and prospects.
It starts by gathering information, what do you already know? The information held about B2B and B2C data often differs, but generally you’ll have a good idea about who your average customer is. Creating a persona is less about segmenting according to job title for example, it’s about marketing to the typical person that you are targeting. Even at work, people are still people, and thinking carefully about their personality and lifestyle attributes will make your tailored email messages more effective.
It can seem a strange exercise at first, to sit down and begin to ‘stereotype’ your ideal customers. Summing up their education, income, beliefs and affiliations, whether they read newspapers or go to the gym can seem like you’re being judgmental, but you’re not.It’s simply a way of imagining that person in your mind, and addressing your email and online marketing messages to them.
Finally, think about how your persona views your products and services. What are they be looking for, how do your products meet or exceed their expectations? What kind of sales process do they need? What objections might they throw up?
For example, let’s imagine a luxury boutique hotel by the coast in Cornwall. The hotel is small and has an open fire, a library, and a dog friendly policy, and cater for urban couples seeking relaxation and Cornish things to do. The hotel does not have a spa.
Using a persona gives your brand far more personality and makes you approachable, friendly and ultimately memorable – all of which will engage new customers and encourage repeat bookings.
You may find when you begin this exercise that you have more than one clear persona. This is fine, it just means that you can now tailor your web content and email campaigns to different personas, and use dynamic content based on their previous interests and behaviour to put the right message in front of the right person.
Completing the persona exercise will allow you to learn about your target audience. Really get to know them and understand what they expect and need, from tone of voice, to time of day to send.Creating a persona will create consistency across the marketing team, your campaigns and a clear message to your subscribers.Don’t forget – its likely you’ve got more than one persona (multiple product offerings certainly will), you may need to go over the exercise again, concentrate first on your most important core clients/sectors.