In our last article in this series, we discussed Customer Segmentation.
You’re ready to move to the next level of your marketing: enhancing and differentiating your content and messaging as part of your overall strategy.
Once you segment your customers by behavior and value, how do you differentiate your content and messaging, a critical step to break through the clutter to get their attention? Consumers are exposed to thousands of marketing messages every day, and have become skilled at filtering out those that aren’t relevant. To make sure we make the cut, we as marketers must have a good understanding of who our customers are and what they want.
The solution to “knowing your audience” is to develop rich customer profiles or marketing personas. A marketing persona, or buyer persona is a “fictional and generalized representation of your ideal customer(s).” These profiles or personas can take your content strategy to the next level.
Generic customer profiles contain basic information: age range, geographic location, household income, incidence of children or pets, rent or own their homes, etc. and provide a starting point. Unfortunately, such general profiles are not based on deep buyer insights and they don’t say anything about a customer’s values or delve into their experiences. – All males between the ages of 45 and 60 who are homeowners aren’t the same. They don’t all have the same issues or goals.
Developing rich customer profiles of your customer behavior segments reveals more detail about your target customer. The more granularity you’re able to include in these profiles, the more tuned into your customers needs, the more your messages will resonate. Going beyond basic details into what they buy and how much they spend with you, something you’ve already done with segmentation will help you improve the quality of your messaging.
Why It Matters
If you don’t understand your audience, how can you create relevant offers and content that they need or want? When developing content strategy, knowing whom you’re writing for helps create content that resonates with your customers, sends them signals, and much more likely motivate desired behavior. This in turn leads to better results and improved marketing performance
Offering the right message at the right time also reduces wasted time and opportunity on messages that never had a chance for success. You can increase your marketing return by not wasting energy – and valuable chances for interaction – on messages unfit for the individual consumer.
