Remember having imaginary friends as a kid? In the branding world, imaginary friends exist as adults, too. They’re called target audience personas. Here’s a breakdown of what that means and how it can help your brand.

Building a character of someone who you want to buy your product

Put simply, a target audience persona is a profile of an imaginary person who would make a purchase from your brand. Because a brand can have a wide target audience, there might be more than one target audience persona. Creating these profiles might not seem like a must for your business, but they can help your sales in the long run. The better you understand your customers, the more sales you can make.

A target audience persona helps you understand your buyer

So, how exactly does creating a fake person help you understand customers? It gives you someone to “talk” to about products, which provides direction for your branding strategy. By creating a persona with specific details, you can understand what a customer in your target audience is looking for in a product. You can learn the customer’s likes, habits, and problems, which helps you improve your products and make more sales.

Your persona is based on your existing and ideal audiences

Figuring out how to build a target audience persona takes research. You’ll need to gain insight from real customers, which can be done in a few ways. First, you can look at data that tells you who is visiting your store/looking at your website for a general idea of the type of customers you have. As SmartBug notes, to narrow that information down, you can send out surveys, check out market research reports, and more.

It’s important to base your personas on not only the customers you currently have but also any customers you want to have. That way, you can learn how to adjust your strategy to fit other targets if needed.

Be detailed and name your persona

You’ll want to be as detailed as possible when creating personas. That means giving each profile characteristics like an age, a gender, a job description, hobbies, challenges, and yes, even a name. Feel free to get creative and even a little silly with this part. Pinckney Marketing suggests making the names catchy, like “Vegan Victor” or “Triathalon Theresa.” Again, the more you model the personas after real people, the better you can understand your audience.

Stay tuned as we dive into more specific breakdowns of building target audience personas! In the meantime, contact October Dreams Marketing for more branding tips.