There are millions, if not billions of brands in the global marketplace today. The sheer number of brands can make your head explode and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make your brand stand out from the rest.
By creating a brand persona, you separate yourself from the field and make yourself distinct from your competitors. Whether intentional or not, every brand has a brand persona. It’s best, however, if you put serious thought into shaping your brand persona for the good of your brand.
What is Brand Persona?
A brand personality is a set of human characteristics you can attribute to your business. It tells your customer everything they need to know about you: from what you offer to how you interact with the marketplace.
Is your brand bold, tough, or energetic? Is it introspective, tender, or soft? Things as basic as colors, images, and even font choice play vital roles in defining your message. Without a clear personality, your business can come across as confusing and unfocused.
Why Do You Need to Build a Brand Persona for Your Business?
By humanizing your business with certain character traits, it creates a story that customers can connect with as they see reflections of themselves in your business. If they can associate themselves with your brand, they are more likely to trust you and keep coming back to you.
Using PR in Crafting Your Brand Persona
Despite more and more people relying on social media and mobile in information dissemination, traditional public relations remains relevant in developing brand awareness. By utilizing conventional channels such as television, radio, billboards, newspapers, and magazines, traditional PR builds a positive brand image for your target audience.
In contrast, digital PR uses online methods such as social media, blogging, SEO, and email marketing to achieve the same boost in brand awareness.
A good PR agency has the means and knowledge to combine both traditional and digital PR to create a more impactful brand persona. While some campaigns work best with digital PR, others do so using traditional PR. A combination of the two almost always gets the best results.
By combining both types of PR, you can capture a much wider audience than you would if you favor just one or the other.
Our PR experts work on these elements to come up with an ideal, authentic marketing strategy and a complementary brand persona.
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Understanding the Ins and Outs of Your Business
This may seem self-explanatory but it cannot be emphasized enough. Clearly defining what industry you are in and identifying your competitors is critical in establishing your brand.
Whether it be providing a specific service or meeting the demands of the audience, the type of business you have entered into tells everyone in your company, your competition, and your audience that you know what you are getting yourself into.
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Define Your Brand
From words to colors to typography, clearly defining your brand goes hand-in-hand with identifying what your brand persona plans to convey. If these elements come together smoothly, all the better for your brand to reach its desired audience.
Think of how you want your brand to be perceived by your customers. Do you want to come across as caring or aloof? Knowledgeable or caring? Create a list of traits that define your brand by pretending it is a person. From these traits, you can choose specific colors and hues as well as fonts that better identify your brand persona.
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Effective Brand Messaging
What does your brand want to share with your audience? What do you want to accomplish with the products and services that you have to offer? Are you introducing something new or offering a different take on what is already there?
Knowledge of what message you want to convey lets you definitively stand in a space that both you and your audience can identify. This insight should allow you to create your brand’s mission and vision statement while informing customers about what plan on delivering.
If you don’t get these concepts perfect at this stage, no need to worry. You can always come back and make changes later.
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Targeting Your Specific Market
Identifying who your target market is can help make or break your brand. After all, the service you provide should meet that market’s needs or it becomes unnecessary. Your target audience can be narrowed down by age, gender, location, social class, interests, and many other factors.
Although your brand doesn’t need to be a direct reflection of who your customers are, it’s important to know them well enough to create a persona that resonates with them. They can be very niche or very broad, depending again on what product or service you are providing.
Here are some steps to help you reach your target audience:
- Analyze your customer base, do interviews
Look at who already buys your product or service. How old are they, where do they live, and what are their interests? A good way to learn this is through engaging on social or distributing customer surveys. - Conduct market research and identify industry trends
Look at the market research for your industry to determine if there are holes in service that your product can fill. Look at trends for similar products to see where they are focusing efforts, then hone in further on your product’s unique value. - Analyze competitors
Look at competitors to see who they are commonly selling to and how they go about it. Are they using online or offline channels? Are they focusing on the decision-maker or the supporter? - Define who your target audience isn’t
There will be consumers who are close to your target demographic, but who will not act on messages. You should therefore try to be specific in determining who your audience is and who it isn’t. Knowing this will keep your teams from devoting ad spending to segments that will not yield returns. - Continuously revise
Gathering more data and interacting with customers will yield an increasingly accurate understanding of your target audiences. Based on this information, you must keep optimizing and honing personas to achieve the best results. - Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers extensive data about the users visiting your site. This information can help determine key insights such as what channels your target audience is coming from or what type of content they’re engaging and connecting with the most. That will then allow you to make more data-driven decisions during the media planning process.
- Analyze your customer base, do interviews
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Crafting Persuasive Image
Imagery plays an important part in crafting your brand persona. Whether it be a logo, colors, or photos you post on various social media accounts, these are similar to puzzle pieces that, when assembled, complete your brand’s picture.
These images should come together to tell your brand’s story but they should also be able to do so individually. Some brands identify with specific colors, fonts, and styles. More often than not, those have strong brand personas that remain unchanged for years.
Let Us Help You Craft Your Brand’s Persona
We at Centaur Marketing possess the experience, knowledge, and ability to help you definitively craft your brand’s persona. Our team of marketing professionals is versed in the ins and outs of both traditional and digital PR, allowing us to identify which to focus on for your brand.
We help you define your brand, create the right brand messaging, and hit your ideal target market. Through informed research and analysis, we help craft a message for that audience while keeping you ahead of your competition.
We also ensure that you keep evolving so that your brand won’t stay stagnant or be left behind. Contact us today to learn more.