What is a Brand Persona?

Simply put, your company’s brand persona is an identity that humanizes it and showcases how it’s unique. It’s a way to connect with your customers and share a story that makes them want to be part of your company’s journey. 

The goal is to create a persona that feels natural and easily resonates with your target audience. Achieving this objective requires strategic thinking, planning, and collaboration between multiple departments.

A brand persona works to establish the personality traits of your company into a character that drives engagement with prospects and customers. Your team will need to understand the brand personality before a persona can be fully formed. 

Your company needs to find a way to relay the key aspects of its goals to customers in a way that’s interesting to them. Marketing authenticity is crucial when developing a brand persona, as it helps develop trust and cultivate lasting relationships with customers. Creating a persona that encourages repeat purchases, customer referrals, and ongoing client relationships will increase your company’s ROI.

This persona is going to be part of every interaction with your brand, including social media content, sales, and products. Creating a persona that captures the overall goals of your company will help develop a unified voice.

Brand Persona Vs. Customer Persona

Another key marketing strategy is understanding your customer persona. Your marketing team may deal with many different types of personas when developing their brand plan. Customer, buyer, and user personas help you pinpoint the wants and needs of your intended audiences.

Customer personas are representations of your current client base who share similar characteristics and purchasing habits. Your company will most likely have multiple customer personas to explore because your product can provide solutions to a variety of users. Breaking down and understanding these personas can help your marketing and sales departments better connect and retain current customer relationships.

These customer personas can be used to create a profile that can be used as a reference point when deciding on marketing and engagement strategies. By using data from current clients, your team can develop these personas to represent buyers for your product. This can help create marketing content, drive engagement by making a customer connection, and increase overall sales.

While it should go without saying, it’s important to note that customers and sales and a one-size-fits-all approach are not a workable strategy. Each prospect is looking at your product because they believe it can provide the solution to the unique problems their business is facing. By segmenting customers into groups based on similarities like buying behaviors, demographics, and user engagement, your marketing team can pinpoint what attracts customers to your product.

Having this deep understanding of your client base can inform product decisions and provide insight into future marketing campaigns. Customer personas and the brand persona, while different concepts, can work together to help your team create cohesive marketing content and fill the sales pipeline. Developing a strong brand voice helps in implementing a customer engagement strategy while customer personas exemplify the intended audiences for these messages.

Steps to Creating a Brand Persona

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1. Whether you’re creating a brand persona for the first time or refining an existing one, start by deciding what message your company should convey to its customers. 

2. Take a look at your products, analyze your mission statement, and begin crafting a message that will resonate with your target audiences. If you’re not sure how to begin, consider the solution your product offers and think about how your team can authentically convey this to customers. 

3. Next, determine your target audiences and create customer personas. This will help your marketing team segment campaigns to ensure the right content gets to the right people at the right time. Not every customer is in the same stage of the customer journey map, which means timing is key when trying to target leads who are ready to make a purchase.

4. By using data from your current customer base and buyer personas, you can gain a deeper understanding of the pain points and triggers that cause customers to decide to purchase. This information is crucial for creating a sales funnel that successfully gets leads to the buying stage. It will also help your team re-engage leads who need a bit more time to decide while strengthening the relationship between them and your company.

5. Once you’ve decided whom to target, it’s time to focus on your product's best qualities and incorporate these into your brand persona. Qualities to emphasize may include superior product features, pricing, and commitment to excellent customer experience. This will help your company remain competitive and stand out among a sea of B2B competitors vying to offer their products and solutions to the same or similar target audiences. 

6. Highlighting the aspects that make your product unique is an incredibly important aspect of crafting a successful brand persona. It will inform your marketing decisions and create brand loyalty among your customer base. 

7. Make sure to research your competitors to get a better understanding of where your business falls within the market. This will also help your team decide which features should be highlighted as unique when developing your brand persona. Understanding your competitors allows your team to see the solutions other companies offer, as well as paint a picture of the reasons your customer base chooses your product. 

8. Data-informed marketing is a game changer for those who want to develop strong marketing strategies. Using information gathered from website engagement, social media campaigns, and real customer feedback can enable your team to create accurate customer personas. By understanding the motivations of your target audience, your marketing department can create an authentic brand persona that reflects the values of your customer base.

9. Consistency is key when developing a brand persona. From your messaging to your brand kit, providing a cohesive profile to customers will help your brand stick out amongst competitors while promoting client loyalty. Make sure all of your employees bear the brand persona in mind when interacting with customers. 

10. Once you have all of these aspects planned out, you’ll want to build an actual profile. This means taking all of the attributes and characteristics that your team has decided on and personifying them into a profile. Include a name, picture, bio, personality type, and quote. Having a fully formed profile like this aligns your departments.

Examples of a Brand Persona

There are many types of brand personas, and it’s important to develop one that best fits your company. This strategy can be showcased through visual representation like mascots, descriptions like customer profiles, and even celebrity endorsers. Finding the best type of representation will make sure your brand persona resonates with the right target audience.

Sometimes mascots are separate from personas, but often, they’re interchangeable. It’s all about understanding what the representation is providing to the audience. Personas should be authentic and represent the brand accurately, while mascots can make more of an appeal to likeability.

For example, Disney has created an unforgettable brand persona through constant communication and marketing centered around “the magic” of their products and services. They successfully communicate their goals to their target audience through an authentic lens that has created strong brand loyalty among their supporters. 

Smaller brands may not have the vast resources corporations like Disney can put into their marketing plans, but your team can still take notes. Putting customers first and listening to feedback is crucial to understanding how your company is perceived by its audience. Using this information can help create consistent marketing materials that convey a unified brand presence. 

Brand Persona Vs. Brand Personality

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These terms are often used when discussing a marketing strategy, but it’s important to understand the difference. Brand personality involves tone, voice, and written communication strategy, while brand persona goes a step further. The brand personality of your company will help inform the brand persona by providing the framework for your marketing team to develop within. 

By determining whether your brand’s voice should be formal or more laid back, or whether your company wants to come across as trendy or evergreen, a personality begins to emerge. These characteristics can then be used to help bring your company’s mission to life through a brand persona. 

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