A guide to segregating your target market and creating brand personas that actually drive strategy.
You know what’s the most confusing and underwhelming experience I had with brands? They all say that they know their target audience but when we sat down to discuss and elaborate on the topic, most of them failed miserably in identifying their true customers. No wonder, they were facing challenges not only in branding but in business operations as well. Brands need to understand that just because they have a product or service to offer, they just can’t sell it to anybody. On top of that, identifying target audience goes beyond demographics, you need to dive deeper into the psychology of your potential customers. You need to add characteristics to your potential customers, this is where brand strategy impacts customer perception. When an individual comes across your product or service in the market, what’s the first thought that comes to their mind, and more importantly, why should they even care about your brand? This again leads us to brand positioning, which itself is a different element altogether.
This blog will help you comprehend the significance of target audience and creating a buyer persona, this will not only uplift your branding but will elevate data points and information for your sales team. So the next time they pitch your product, they know they are doing it in front of the right audience. Not to mention, this saves a lot of effort, time, money and resources that up until now was getting wasted in front of the wrong crowd.
Let’s decode this piece by piece.
Why knowing your audience is mission-critical
According to a HubSpot study, companies that exceed leads and revenue objectives are 2.2x times more likely to use buyer personas compared to those who don’t. Another interesting stat is that in a report by Cintell, it was discovered that 71% of companies that elevate their revenue and lead figures have documented personas, while 85% of underperformers do not. These are some strong quantitative data that paints the real and dire need for brands to have a well documented brand persona and must work on focusing their target audience. In an age of hyper-saturation and short attention spans, your brand’s ability to resonate depends entirely on how well you understand your audience.
Segmenting your target market for clarity
Before you reach your target audience, you need to work on your target market. Long before you create a buyer’s persona, you need to reach the true crowd which defines an ambiguous target audience for your brand. It starts with the first step of audience segmentation, you need to segment your market into meaningful groups. As a founder, you need to apply demographic filters of age, income, gender, job title and so on. With segmentation, you shape your audience. For instance, McKinsey reports personalization grounded in proper segmentation and buyer persona crafting can help brands deliver 5x to 8x times the return on investment on marketing expenses and elevate sales by more than 10%.
Research methods that delivers
For founders trying to create buyer personas, they need more than just intuition. They require structured and reliable research. At this point, surveys are a great choice. Founders and CEOs can use tools like Typeform or Google Forms to run a simple survey asking their audience about their goals, pain points, decision-making process, and content preferences. Followed by this comes in-depth interviews, which can offer qualitative nuance. Important and critical questions like “what made you start looking for a solution like ours?” or “what frustrates you most about current options?” can bring key insights that no search engine outcome will ever provide.
Once done with surveys and interviews, founders can use digital data. They can use Google Analytics to study the website metrics. Along with this demographics and interest reports can show age brackets, gender distribution, and affinity categories. Behavior Flow helps in comprehending how different segments move through your site, where they drop off, where they engage. Complement that with social media insights. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all provide detailed analytics on follower demographics, content engagement, and even competitor benchmarks. As of 2023, 82% of marketers said they use social media data to improve targeting and segmentation efforts.
How to Create Brand Personas That Actually Guide Strategy
It happens post research, as a founder or CEO, once you are done with your customer and market research via surveys, interviews and digital data. It’s time to create brand personas that are actually usable. It's time to dive deep. Your buyer persona template should include essentials like name, age, gender, income level, education, job title (for B2B), goals, pain points, buying triggers, objections, preferred channels, and sources of influence. A simple statistic that can help you understand its power is that buyer personas make websites 2–5 times more effective and easier to use for target users.
Key thing to remember, personas are active documents and not static profiles. If you are going to create it once and then forget about it. I suggest you forget about this whole exercise altogether. Don’t make that mistake. Consumer behavior shifts, platforms evolve, and you shall hopefully grow. As a founder who has put in so much effort in creating these buyer personas must revisit them from time to time. You can also use A/B testing to validate assumptions, see which headlines, CTAs, or offers perform best across different segments. Your buyer personas should always strive for influencing product features, content calendars, or campaign targeting.
Why buyer personas sharpen your brand promise
Buyer personas demand research, segmentation and proper utilization of resources and online data and tools. In exchange it offers a sharp promise to deliver increased figures of conversions, sales and revenue. You may seek external help, letting a strategist guide you through brand personas are of the real benefits of hiring a creative brand consultant. This happens because after a proper buyer persona is created there is no room for unrequited information or sales pitch data that is not targeted to the right audience. You speak freely and more confidently knowing you are in front of the right audience. When you understand your audience deeply, everything clicks. Your content aligns with them. The message delivers with clarity and your product is reasonably adored by your audience leading to sales.
Final words
Knowing your audience is a skill acquired with the help of knowledge and relevant data. The better you know your audience, the more precisely you can craft your brand strategy, marketing campaigns, ads and other content management. When all of these things land perfectly and in sync with each other conversions occur and sales follow without any roadblocks, confusion or complications.
Let’s end this guide with a cheerful note, make sure you use all the techniques and methods we discussed and create brand persona for your product that fits, in case of any queries, we are just here to help.
