Okay, so now you have a good grasp of the current status of your business, and you know what you want to achieve. But, that’s enough about you! For your strategy to succeed, you’ll need to really get to know your target audience too. It’s the only way to guarantee that your marketing will be relevant and valuable to them.

To avoid taking a generic, one-size-fits-all approach to messaging, it’s helpful to develop customer personas. Personas are simply fictional representations of your ideal customers that help you to understand them in finer detail, and while some businesses focus their attention on one main persona, it’s much more helpful to build several profiles that do justice to the diversity of your customers...

Most businesses look to reach out to customers across different genders, age groups, locations, and incomes. Already, a whole bunch of different potential personas are showing up, but it doesn't stop there, it goes way beyond recognising your audiences’ different demographics. This is because even within the same demographic there’s a huge variety of what we call ‘psychographic’ information about their needs, motivations and preferences that need to be taken into account.

Let’s take a business that sells running shoes, for example. Some of their customers might be just starting out, while others might be professionals. Some might be sprinters, while some might run long distance. Some might be road runners, while others might prefer cross-country. And, while some customers might be looking for something comfortable and affordable, others might want to dress to impress.

Once again, we’re still not finished; you still need to account for their different behaviors. A set of customers could be the same age, have the same job, live on the same street, and they could even be training to finish the same marathon in the same amount of time. They could want the exact same shoe, and even then, the way they would look to find and purchase that shoe could be completely different.

One customer might just Google what they need and make a purchase in no time at all, while another might read numerous blogs and reviews before committing to a purchase. Another might rely on the recommendations of the influencers they follow, and so on. Take this into account when you're creating your personas. Ask: what kind of content do they consume, and which channels do they use to find it?

If you cover all those bases - demographics, needs and behaviors - you should have a rich understanding of your desired customers, or even your not-so desired customers. These are known as ‘negative’ personas – the people that your brand doesn’t want to prioritize doing business with. It might be that they’re people who have unrealistic expectations or demands that your business can’t actually meet, or maybe they frequently return purchases for no good reason.

Just as personas help you to identify and communicate with your target audiences, negative personas can be used to exclude certain customer types from advertising or email campaigns, thus reducing the risk of wasting your budget.

Personas can be an incredible source of inspiration and information when it comes to making marketing decisions. But, for this to be the case, the personas you create must be the product of extensive research. They need to be based on real data produced by real customers, and these might be current customers, lost customers, target customers, and even your competitors’ customers!

Along with developing personas, here are a few more tricks to help you understand your customers. It might be helpful to create customer empathy maps, which help businesses to walk in the shoes of a typical customer by exploring their external world and their internal mindset.

What do they say and do? What are they seeing, hearing, thinking and feeling? What are their pain points, and what are they looking to gain? This level of detail can make a real difference. It’ll help remove any biases or assumptions within your team's approach and help to ensure that your messaging is more relevant and appealing to customers.

It might also be helpful to move away from fixating on a customer’s age, and start thinking about their ‘life stage’ instead. This is because customers within the same generation will no doubt be doing very different things with their lives. By targeting ‘millennials’, for example, you could be targeting people who are recent graduates, moving out, getting married or having kids, and all these have a much more significant impact on behavior and spending habits than the date on a birth certificate...

Understanding Your Audience