Are you ready to run a campaign to promote your franchise’s newest service? There’s more to an effective ad campaign than great creative and messaging – although that is important. The first step, however, is clearly identifying your target audience and developing a compelling persona to make sure you are reaching exactly who you want.
Where do those clever personas that you see detailed in marketing pitches and product information come from? The short answer is they are created using a lot of research and imagination.
Whose Problem Are You Solving?
When you launch a new service, you are likely doing so to solve a specific problem. A great place to begin in developing a persona is to decide what pain point your new service solves and who is likely to be dealing with that problem.
You may already be familiar with this customer persona. Perhaps your franchise already works with them to provide other services. If so, you can build on that relationship by solving another problem for them.
If this is a new audience for you, however, you have some work to do. We always start with research:
- Identify customers who use similar services or products, whether your brand’s or a competitor’s.
- Gather basic demographic information such as age, gender, household income, where they live and whether they are married or have kids.
- Using that data, dig deep into existing data on people who fall into that demo or demos (there may be more than one). Multiple tools have compiled mountains of consumer research, such as the Global Web Index, Kantar Media and MRI-Simmons. (Note: Most require a subscription to access their data.)
- You may also want to conduct some primary research, such as a survey, focus group or one-on-one interviews.
- If the service is performed in a certain place, such as a restaurant or convenience store, it might make sense to do some field research to understand how the service would affect your persona.
Name Your Semi-Fictional Persona
Once you’ve gathered and digested your research, you can get creative. We like to name our personas – some of our current faves are Millennial Maya, a mom in her mid-30s, and Investor Ivan, a multi-unit franchise owner in his late 40s – and find a photo that looks like the person we are imagining.
Then, we simply tell their story, focusing on the problem we are helping them solve and how that can improve their life. We talk about what they are thinking, doing and feeling. We discuss the other issues and pressures clamoring for their attention. And finally, we dissect how they consume media to pinpoint how we intend to reach them.
Your New Persona Teammate
Now it’s time to put that persona to work for you. Create content and creative that will resonate with the persona, making sure they can see themselves using your new service or product to improve their situation. Speak their language, telling them how you can solve their problem for them.
Use what you know about your persona’s habits and attributes to target them precisely.
Build your campaigns on the media platforms that you know your persona uses regularly and trusts. Depending on the platform, you may be able to target based on demographics, behaviors, job titles, household income, geography, using look-alike modeling and other criteria. Now it’s time to make the campaigns live. Just like that, your research and creativity have birthed a compelling persona. Now your buyer persona becomes a valuable member of your team, helping you attract ideal customers and expand your customer base.
