Is Your Brand Attracting the Right Audience?

There are many facets to a strong, consistent brand—logo design, color palette, web copy, and tone of voice just to name a few. But there is one guiding factor that must be the touchstone of all your brand’s decisions: your target audience.

Your target audience (or customer) should be the single most influential person in your business. You can listen to business advisors, colleagues, and close friends, but your customers should trump them all.

An all to common mistake that we’ve seen in some brands is designing their marketing solutions around themselves or their own preferences. It’s easy to forget that what you may like or prefer may not be representative of your target customers and clients.

How to Design for Your Target Audience Using Client Profiles and Buyer Personas

So, how do you determine who your target buyer is, what they want, and how to attract them? How can you better understand your ideal customers’ opinions in order to drive faster growth?

There are two powerful tools for gathering information about your ideal customer: client profiles and buyer personas.

Client Profiles and Buyer Personas are two parts of a marketing strategy that will help you gather meaningful information about your ideal customers. Armed with these, you can better shape your marketing, and get more powerful results.

Client Profiles Answer Who They Are and Where They Are

A client profile is a factual representation of your target buyer, and is fundamentally based on empirical data.

A client profile collates insights about who your target buyers are—hard facts and information that can be observed and gathered through reliable sources like web analytics, white papers, industry reports, research studies, surveys, and sometimes even census data.

A client profile helps you understand the numbers behind your target buyers—where they live, their ages, genders, income level, and the methods they use to discover and engage with your brand.

Buyer Personas Answer Why and How They Buy

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based solely on accurate market research.

Buyer personas focus on how your customers feel, what their pain points are, and the evolving factors that motivate them. A buyer persona helps you get out of your own head, and see the world through your target customers’ eyes.

Even more important, buyer personas help you create an emotional connection with your target customer. This emotional connection allows you to speak in your target buyers’ language, and is a powerful tool for converting prospects into loyal buyers.

A buyer persona helps you know and understand your target customers’ issues, so you can solve their problems, and help them accomplish their goals.

Putting It into Action

Getting to know your target customer is your springboard for success. To leverage these valuable insights, you must develop and optimize a branding strategy following these three steps:

1. Get to Know Your Customer: Create in-depth, highly accurate client profiles and buyer personas.
2. Design for Them: Customize your marketing and branding so it resonates with your target customer’s situation and needs.
3. Monitor the Results: Track your analytics; continue to shape and reshape your marketing materials so they continue to yield better results.

As designer, author, and illustrator Frank Chimero once said, “people ignore design that ignores people.” And the opposite is true too.

So, whether you’re branding or rebranding your business, take some time to consider your target customers. Create both client profiles and buyer personas, shape your brand around your target customer and then closely monitor the results.

The more you know about your customers, the more clearly you can speak in their language, and consequently, drive faster growth.

Do you need help shaping your brand to attract your target customer? The friendly team at Harvest Media will get you on the road to success. Give us a call at 847-942-3087.