Never heard of a brand persona before? No worries. That is why we are here to help. Every billboard advertisement, social media post, and marketing flyer is an opportunity for you to tell your customers who you are and what you are all about. Each of different items are influenced by brand personas. Thus, understanding what brand personas are and how they can be used will allow you to take full advantage of those advertising opportunities and help you convert your audience to customers.
What is a Brand Persona?
It’s not that complicated. Your brand persona is the personality or “voice” of your business that shines through your advertising. In simple terms, it is your brand’s personality.
“A well-crafted buyer persona (or customer persona, audience persona, or marketing persona) allows you to personalize your marketing on a large scale by humanizing core target groups of your customer base.”
Hootsuite
If you sell children’s clothing, your brand persona will likely need to be fun, light-hearted, and compassionate. However, if you sell motorcycles, you will need an entirely different brand persona. Your brand persona will be fierce, fiery, and fun. There will be more room for adult humor or content that would be completely unacceptable from a children’s store.
Why Does it Matter?
You may be wondering how this is different from your brand. Your brand persona and your brand should be closely aligned. However, brand personas focus specifically on the personality you are using to communicating your brand across different mediums and platforms.
While you should have one brand, you can have one or multiple brand personas. In fact, we encourage multiple personas.
The Importance of Multiple Brand Personas
When you are selling a product or service, you always want to be sure to consider your audience. The way you may sell a pencil, for example, to a 5 year old boy and a 30 year old woman would be very different. In advertising, this is the same. The way you communicate or reach your audience should depend on who your audience is and what they care about.
The various platforms you use to market your product are different and have different audiences. The way you speak to your followers on Facebook should be very different from how you communicate with your followers on LinkedIn.
Understanding your audience will allow you to build better brand personas. Your LinkedIn brand persona will be different from your Facebook. Taking the time and effort to carefully craft these identities can pay off in the long run.
The Challenges of Multiple Brand Personas
However, one of the biggest challenges is balancing multiple brand personas while still managing to maintain one cohesive brand.
Here is the way I like to think about it. We as individuals have one brand or identity. However, we have multiple different personas or aspects of our personalities. We show different aspects of ourselves at work, with friends, and around our families. We don’t speak to our grandmother the way we speak to our boss or our friend.
Brand personas are the same. You should keep your brand or business identity consistent across platforms, but you should also craft a specific brand persona for each platform or medium.
Whether or not your realize it, these small things are big things for businesses. Your brand persona can draw customers in or turn them away.
One of the biggest challenges of brand personas is balancing multiple brand personas while still maintaining one cohesive brand. Make sure to constant ask yourself – does this still align with my primary brand.
Building your Brand Persona
There are tons of great resources providing tips on how to create a brand persona such as Weebly or Buffer. Here are a few of our favorite tips from Forbes:
- “Develop your personas around the 20% of your customers who account for 80% of your income.” – Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
- “By understanding their problem or challenge, you can determine how your product or service can best help them, where they may be typically seeking information on how to solve that problem, and even brainstorm content ideas that will engage with this persona.” – Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
- “Consumers today expect that a brand persona be honest, human and true, but all that can be bolstered when the brand shows it really cares about higher-order ideals like community, humanity or citizenship.” – Daryl McCullough, Citizen Relations
- “Considering the platforms, channels, times of day and overall communication method that is best for each persona will help ensure your ads are optimized for that audience.” – Ben LeDonni, CreativeMMS
If you have questions about how Adventure Ad Agency can help you build your brand personas or rejuvenate your advertising strategy, contact us today! For more ad insights, explore our blog or call us at 1-864-400-9920.