Audacious Personas

In this episode we talk about how in the dynamic landscape of modern marketing, understanding your audience is not just a strategy—it’s a necessity. One of the most effective tools for achieving this understanding is the creation and utilization of customer avatars, or personas. These fictional, yet data-driven representations of your ideal customers can transform your marketing efforts, allowing you to tailor messages, content, and campaigns that resonate deeply with your target audience.

1. Getting to Know Your Customers on a Personal Level

Customer personas go beyond traditional demographic data. They delve into the psyche of your customers, understanding their goals, challenges, and pain points. By creating detailed personas, you humanize your target audience, enabling you to relate to them on a personal level. This understanding forms the foundation for building meaningful connections that drive customer loyalty.

2. Precision Targeting for Maximum Impact

One-size-fits-all marketing is a relic of the past. In the era of customer-centricity, precision is key. Customer personas allow you to segment your audience effectively, ensuring that your messages are directed towards the right people at the right time. Whether it’s through social media, email marketing, or content creation, personas empower you to deliver tailored experiences that resonate with specific segments of your audience.

3. Crafting Compelling Content

Content is king, but not all content is created equal. Customer personas guide your content strategy by providing insights into the topics, formats, and channels that resonate most with your audience. Whether your customers prefer in-depth articles, engaging videos, or bite-sized infographics, personas help you craft content that captivates and compels action.

4. Enhancing User Experience

Customer personas extend beyond marketing—they shape the entire customer experience. From website design to product development, personas inform decisions that enhance user experience. When your audience feels that your brand understands and addresses their needs, they are more likely to engage and become loyal customers.

5. Data-Driven Decision Making

In the fast-paced world of marketing, data is the cornerstone of success. Customer personas are not static; they evolve as you gather more data and insights. Regularly revisiting and refining your personas based on analytics ensures that your marketing strategies remain aligned with the changing needs and preferences of your audience.

Conclusion: A Personalized Path to Success

In a world inundated with marketing messages, standing out requires a personal touch. Customer personas empower you to connect with your audience on a deeper level, fostering loyalty and trust. By investing time and resources in creating and leveraging personas, you embark on a personalized path to marketing success—one where your audience feels understood, valued, and more likely to choose your brand over the competition.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to Audacity Marketing with Hazel Quimpo and Michelle Frechette. On this podcast, we’ll challenge you to think differently and break free of the same old strategies. We’ll push you out of your comfort zone and encourage you to think outside the box. So take notes, make bold decisions, and be audacious.

[00:00:33] Speaker C: Hey, Hazel.

[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello, Michelle. Happy to be here. Purple hair on both of us, as always.

[00:00:40] Speaker C: I mean, it does kind of make us audacious, but, you know I think so.

[00:00:45] Speaker B: I think so.

[00:00:45] Speaker C: Yeah. I have a child of the 80s. We had the word bodacious back then. Like, whoa, bodacious. I’d rather be audacious, thank you very much.

[00:00:54] Speaker B: Bodacious is better than we had the bomb, which the bomb never really worked because I’ll be able to say the bomb, not the bomb.

[00:01:01] Speaker C: Yeah, and you never want to say it in an airport either. That’s like, for sure.

[00:01:05] Speaker B: Good point. Good point.

[00:01:07] Speaker C: Sorry.

[00:01:10] Speaker B: Et cetera.

[00:01:11] Speaker C: Yes. So one of the things, of course, we don’t not talk in between episodes, so we do talk a little bit. We start to prep things. And I was thinking with all of the Black Friday sales and things that are going on, we talked about Black Friday a couple of episodes ago, and Black Friday marketing, it really got me thinking about the different marketing channels that we use. And when I started working with you a few years back, you were the first person that really introduced me to how to use customer avatars to determine how to do marketing and how to market within specific channels, especially right as it pertains to plugins, is how we were doing it. Right. But it pertains to everything. Absolutely. No matter who you are, no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to customers. And so those customers have different sets of needs and determining those avatars. So I hope I looked like I knew what you were talking about that first time, but I was.

[00:02:10] Speaker B: You look at poker face. Michelle yeah.

[00:02:12] Speaker C: Jordan oh, yeah. Jordan I know. Jordan.

[00:02:16] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Look at that. Erased from my head. Jordan and I’m like, I saw the.

[00:02:20] Speaker C: Movie Avatar, but that has nothing to do with what she’s talking, so well, let’s dive in.

[00:02:27] Speaker B: I will tell you one thing that I am big on as we go into all of this. When we talk about what a customer avatar, I’ll use the word persona, sometimes interchangeably.

I like to have one for your primary customer, and I also am a huge believer, just as importantly, having one in your primary partner, because there’s a lot of partners out there that you deal with, and that amplifies the whole way that we grow in marketing that both me and Michelle work on with community based marketing. So I like to have an avatar for your customers and for your personas.

[00:03:03] Speaker C: That said, so when you first introduced that concept, like, little bells were ringing in the back of my head of I’ve kind of done that in the past, but didn’t know what it was. So when I was freelancing and building websites for people, I met with a chiropractor. And I said to the chiropractor, who’s your primary customer? And they said, athletes. And I was in their office with them. And I looked around and 80% of the people or more that were there were blue haired people. These were old people. They were slip and falls. They were slip discs. They were broken hips. I said, well, that may be who you want in here, but that’s not who your customer base really is. And so as I was starting to apply backwards some of the stuff that you had taught me, those are some of the things that kind of come up.

[00:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you know what you’re doing. That’s exactly right. I think any website project, every web developer has that problem. They show up and it’s like, well, who are you making this website for? And clearly it’s everybody, right? Everybody wants to give everybody, it’s everybody.

And I’ll say some things that are not audacious. When I see customer avatars and when you look these up, you’re going to find a customer. If you ever look up customer avatar or customer persona template, you’re going to find several that look like this. You’re going to see a grid with a picture of like a lady shopping. And then it’s going to be like she’s in her thirty s and she likes social media and she shops at Target. And then you’re like, oh, that’s the same as everybody. That’s just a woman.

[00:04:37] Speaker C: Does she want to do yoga, too? Because I’m pretty sure.

[00:04:45] Speaker B: I think when we think about it, it’s really important to think the so what of it to your product, to what you’re offering. So if it matters that this woman shops at Target and wears leggings, et cetera, to my business, well, then I’m probably going to dive in another layer deeper that isn’t just frankly their gender. I just bring this up just because people think they have a persona when they’ve just invented a woman. It’s like, that’s a woman.

[00:05:12] Speaker C: I think we all know her. Yeah, exactly.

[00:05:15] Speaker B: I’m like, cool. I like how men there’s like all these diversified personas and then that’s a woman.

So point is, what’s audacious?

I reference gender if it makes sense online. So I personally deal with a lot of clients that deal with mental health and a lot of their they know that they’re the gender of their customers. Often if they’re women or men, mental health stuff for these clients tends to be gendered. So main part of it, tech solutions, not so much so, and it doesn’t even matter. It’s more solution based. And that’s where we get into stuff. I’ll tell you. Going to rattle off the things I like in a persona.

Here’s the things I like.

I like giving them a name that’s gender neutral again because it’s really important to understand who this person is. For example, I like understanding where they live and I like to know at a bare minimum where they hang out online and offline. That’s what I need to know the most. And you can tell me where they hang out online and offline. And man, I can tell you a lot about that person. Tell me what podcast you think they listen to and I can tell you everything about that person.

[00:06:28] Speaker C: Exactly. So when I visualize this whole process, the avatar, the persona is the top of a bell curve. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be marketing and other people aren’t going to buy your product. But the top of that bell curve, that middle section, I can’t remember terminologies I’m trying to think back to math class, but the middle of the bell yeah, the middle of the bell within like what two standard deviations did I say that right?

[00:06:54] Speaker B: There we go.

[00:06:56] Speaker C: And not so much the tails. Right. So that’s kind of like who that particular marketing target is.

Yeah.

[00:07:04] Speaker B: And I would say one project that you and I have worked really well together on this was and a lot of folks in the SaaS area have this right now of like who is a person creating like a middleman who’s like an agency creating products for someone else and who’s doing it themselves. And it’s interesting you and I worked on this in WordPress, but as I feel like we’re in this age of entrepreneurship as everybody can go spin up a little business here it’s come a common thing for I’m seeing so many businesses they’re offering to the middleman agency and then also to the doer. And understanding those personas is really important because they’re different.

And the trick and the cheat is one of them you can market to one of them while selling, while marketing to the other, but not the other way around.

[00:07:59] Speaker C: Right.

[00:08:00] Speaker B: What I mean by that is in this specific example, I could very easily market to the creator and the agency will understand what I’m talking about very well.

Now, I wouldn’t talk about enterprise scale, those sorts of things, but they will certainly understand my product if I have any sort of tech product. And the only reason I know that is because we studied these personas so well and we know that and it’s important.

[00:08:26] Speaker C: Absolutely. You reminded me of a story from my past, Hazel, if you want to indulge me for a moment about oh gosh, it must have been at least 20 years ago, maybe 25. My daughter and I were living with my parents at the time because I was going to school and working full time. And so I would come home from work and come home from school and we’d sit watch TV with them for a while before I do homework. That’s another story. And there was this commercial that would come on all the time trying to sell a car. Don’t remember the car, but there’s a driver and then there’s a woman in the passenger seat and there’s techno music on the radio and she’s doing this pop and lock dance seated in the front seat of the car. I don’t know if you remember that. It’s like burning my brain. And my mother said, I’ll never forget. Like the first time she said, I hate this commercial. And I didn’t say anything. Another week goes by, she’s like, I freaking hate this commercial. Like the third week goes by, she’s been saying the commercial, obviously it’s doing what it’s supposed to do because they’re still running this ad. And she says, I would never buy that car. I hate the commercial so much. Now I’m the point. At that time, I’m in my MBA program in marketing. I turn to her, they don’t care if you buy that car. They’re not trying to sell you that car. She goes, what do you mean? I buy cars. I go, you are not their target audience. They don’t care if you buy that car. Now, if a 60 something year old is sitting there, 50 something, 60 something years there and like, I like that car in spite of the music, I’m going to buy that car. Great, they made another sale.

But you are not the person that that ad is targeting.

[00:09:57] Speaker B: That is really insightful and in fact, I think that goes a lot to marketers, especially marketers who have to stand up to a boss breathing down their neck about marketing to this person or that person. The reason that good marketing works is because it picks some audiences and it shuns some others. By nature.

If nobody is saying, oh, yeah, that is way above me, or that is just not my thing, then I think you’re doing it wrong.

There is too much stuff available in the world for you to try to be everything to everybody. And you had that right. That’s exactly right.

[00:10:37] Speaker C: Yeah. And mom, you are the person that is going to be playing 50s music on their ginormous Cadillac that doesn’t fit in your garage. That is your persona.

[00:10:49] Speaker B: Exactly.

[00:10:50] Speaker C: You can’t be everything to everybody and you have to decide who is the avatar, the persona that is the primary target. And then, like you said, have a secondary that’s fine and market to one and include the other. But marketing to the other is definitely going to exclude your primary target.

[00:11:05] Speaker B: Absolutely. And then just in closing in action, you’re going to see this.

I think it’s important to have something easy and shareable with your team. An easy way to do this is a quick PowerPoint.

I use a bunch of chat GPT prompts these days to, you are the chat GPT queen.

[00:11:26] Speaker C: I love how you use it.

[00:11:28] Speaker B: I’ve been a real obsessed with it. And one of the keys is to read literally a script of all about your business and what you know about your customer. In fact, the script that I wrote has a little meditation for you to start with of like, picture your customer and tell me all the things about them. And from that we can extrapolate if you tell that to AI.

I’ll share in our write up of this episode a couple of really cool prompts that develop like, oh, this is what that customer probably likes. And this is the magic of Chat GPT because what it can do is infer based on some facts. It can infer the rest of the facts from the information of the world.

[00:12:09] Speaker C: I love that. That’s awesome. And if people are interested in learning more because they could ask me, but I’m just going to refer them to you. How do they find you, Hazel? Because this is a great one that people might want to pick your brain about.

[00:12:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I’ve been doing a lot with this and you can even do a self serve version of it on my site where you can do personas with just a voice input and that’s on the clever IO. Go ahead and check it out and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I can share with you a link there.

[00:12:34] Speaker C: Fantastic. Absolutely. And if you missed that, we’ll put it in the show notes. All you got to do is go to our website, audacitymarketing.com and everything’s there for you right there. I love it. I love that I continue to learn from you over time and hopefully it goes both ways because I was going.

[00:12:51] Speaker B: To say likely and your mom, it goes generational.

[00:12:54] Speaker C: Exactly. Wait till you hear what my daughter has to say. We’ll bring her in next time.

Anyway, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Hopefully everybody who’s listening has gained something from this as well. If you have questions of things that you’d like us to talk about, let us know. Hit us up on any of our channels. Hit us up on a DM on our Twitter account at audacity. MKTG. I say Twitter x. Whatever.

[00:13:19] Speaker B: Anyway, I’ve been hanging out on threads lately. Side note ah, I have not gotten.

[00:13:24] Speaker C: Into it yet, but I have an account, but I haven’t really done much with it.

[00:13:28] Speaker B: Everything comes full circle with Zuckerberg, I guess.

[00:13:30] Speaker C: I guess so. For sure. He’s a persona of his own. He is an avatar of one. Anyway, on that note, on that note, we’ll see you all next time. Have a good one. Be Audacious.

[00:13:44] Speaker A: This has been Michelle Frechette and Hazel Quimpo with Audacity Marketing. Dare to be different and Dominate your market with Audacity.