Both Large & Small Businesses Can Use Customer Personas To Their Advantage

A couple of nights ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of small business owners in the Livernois Avenue of Fashion district of Detroit about how to use social media effectively for their business. In preparing for the talk, I kept running into the same word over and over: personas Now, breaking your customer base down to specific buyer personas in nothing new – we've been doing it for many years. But it is the latest marketing ploy that seems to have come into favor – and for good reason.

It used to be you had to have a sophisticated data-base, research and marketing deployment system to really take advantage of multiple marketing strategies targeting specific customer persona groups. Today that ability has gotten both more complex and much easier.

On the complex side, you can create a database, create a good predictive model, run your data through the algorithm you create and send out extremely tailored messaging to each persona group. You can even do it with your TV and online advertising buys. We have tools available to us to buy specific households in our TV media buys and to target specific household IP addresses.

If you want to take the high tech approach a step further, in his recent iMedia Connection article, Steve Sachs talked about using programatic media buying tools to develop systems that deliver your content to the right buyers at exactly the right times during their buying cycle. He says, "For content to be as customizable, per what's useful and relevant to the consumer, we'll need to rethink how dynamic web content can be, and what kind of tech solutions we'll need to allow for truly programmatic placements of content"

But what if you're a small business, like the ones I talked to Tuesday night? If you spend time with your customers, you should be able to break them into different basic buying personas, based on the different types of customers you have, grouped by similar needs. For instance, if you're selling college prep services, you would want to talk to parents seeking your services for their kids differently than you do to students seeking the services for themselves. Each group's concerns and information needs are different.

Once you're figured out your customer personas, there are online tools that make it much easier to send different messages and content to different persona groups at a very modest cost. In his MediaPost article, Jamie Tedford says, "Using Facebook’s Website Custom Audiences or Twitter’s Website Cards, brands can make selling seem less like a forced transaction and more like a personalized suggestion. Again, the win-win is clear. Consumers see unique products that they actually want to buy, and brands increase sales as a result."

So, if you're a bigger brand, there are all kinds of technology available to you, making customization and personalization of your content and marketing messages a very effective strategy. And if you're a small business owner, there are tools available to you as well. They may not be as sophisticated as what the big brands are using, but I'll bet they're more sophisticated than your competition is using – and therein lies your advantage.

Mike McClure, living with multiple personas