BroadVision Marketing Blog

Have you heard the term “persona” recently? Here are 4 target marketing help tips on beginning to develop a persona. Persona is just the latest buzz word for a segment profile. A segment profile is your description of who your targeted clients are and what do they want. In order to be thorough you need to be able to refine your target segment into a sample customer or persona.

1^st Marketing Help Tip: Bases and combinations for creating segment profiles

Creating a persona is like creating a unique paint mixture. First, you start with a base color and then you add addition colors and blend. To create a unique persona you need to look at the many bases and then think of combinations using market segments. Below we have listed some of these bases in a general order of effectiveness:

1. Contextual or Situation Segmentation
2. Value Sought or Benefit Segmentation
3. Behavioral Segmentation
4. Psychographic or Lifestyle Segmentation
5. Demographic or Descriptive Segmentation

2^nd Marketing Help Tip: Other Forms of Segmentation

• Geographic Segmentation—You might be a local business without any reason to look at what other people in the world are doing. In different places people might have different buying habits. Not every segment is as universally pervasive as Coke or McDonalds.
• Geo-demographic Segments, also considered a cluster—You might want to create your persona based on geographic, demographic and possibly some lifestyle segments. In this type of segment cluster you might be looking for people that are similar, but who don’t all live in the same location. 
• Socio-demographic Segments—You might use this mix because it combines trends and fashions which are social factors along with demographics.
• Time Segmentation—You would find this useful if you wanted to know when people did certain things. When do most people shop or go clubbing? What are the things people do seasonally like go holiday shopping or visit summer resorts?
• Nationality also called Ethnic—If you sell a brand designed for a specific ethnic group, you will look at information for that nationality to create the persona you wish to target.
• Cultural Segmentation
• Physiological Segmentation—You might be looking to sell things to men who are big and tall or to people who are left handed.

3^rd Marketing Help Tip: Marketing Position

Marketing positioning is defined as:

1. The process of seeing your brand in the eyes of your target so that your brand has meaning apart from your competition.
2. The process of creating a marketing mix that will come to your persona’s mind along with the attributes the persona will think of relating to the brand.

Marketing positioning means the way you want the persona to perceive of your brand in relations to the competition’s brand. This is the basic factor in communication about the benefits your brand offers that are different from the competition.

Positioning is the key to a successful marketing campaign. A thoroughly created positioning statement based on knowledge of the persona defines your business’s direction and will answer these questions:

• What are your business name and vision elements?
• What do customers think your business does?
• What is the target market persona you have created?
• What does this persona need?
• Who are your competitors?
• What makes your business unique?
• What unique benefit does your value offer provide?

4^th Marketing Help Tip: Two last points

First, please don’t confuse a positioning statement with a market position. A positioning statement tells how you are perceived in the minds of your prospects. A market position statement tells how you want your prospects to think about your company. Your market position is the foundation message you want to deliver to your target segment. A business cannot position itself as anything. However, a positioning statement is about how the market sees what your business stands for.

Second, as you collect all this data to create your persona, you are going to collect much more than you need. It is a good idea to look at each item and decide to put it in an active file or archive it in case you realize you need it later.

What sort of data segmentation forms have you used? Please tell us in the space below.

Jaco Grobbelaar is the owner of BroadVision Marketing. BroadVision Marketing works with business owners to put in place inbound and outbound marketing strategies that consistently secure new clients. The BroadVision Marketing Training Center is located in Petaluma, CA and primarily serves companies in the San Francisco Bay area.

Jaco can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.766.9778 or connect with Jaco on Facebook - www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing - and LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.