Our industry will always be rife with buzz-words. As we depart from another engaging Digital Dealer Conference, I noticed that terms like “digital retailing,” “bots,” and “AI” are still the sexiest of terms driving new products and services dealers need to strengthen their bottom line.
Technology will continue to push our industry forward, and I am always encouraged to see exciting new platforms that will help us market, engage, and track our continued relationships with our prospects and customers alike. I will note that most of our industry’s favorite terms tend to lean towards the technical, not personal, and I want to put one on your radar that has nothing to do with your website, your analytics or technology.
This buzz-word may not be as sexy as the others, but if understood and applied to your dealership’s marketing strategies, it can help connect you to prospects and customers with greater efficiency.
PERSONAS
Many of us understand our target market, and we actively communicate to them every day, with a blend of online and offline strategies we hope that makes them customers. How many of you are looking beyond the target and dialing into your “customer’s personas”?
You may have heard the term, maybe gone as far as going through customer persona identification exercise to strengthen your marketing. For the sake of this month’s article, I want to state the difference between a target audience and a customer persona, then walk you through how to build customer personas for a more insightful approach to your marketing efforts.
Let’s define both.
Target Audience
A target audience is the intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement or other messages. In marketing and advertising, it is a particular group of consumers within the pre-determined target market, identified as the targets or recipients for a particular advertisement or message. (Source: Wikipedia)
Customer Persona
Buyer (customer) personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different types of buyers. The strongest buyer (customer) personas are based on market research as well as on insights you gather from your actual customer base — through surveys and interviews. (Source: Hubspot)
It’s easy to see the difference between the two.
A target audience strategy is broader. It can be defined by higher-level details such as age, location, and various other core pillars. I personally feel that we make a lot of assumptions of our target audience by blanket market research however we need to rely on that to build the audience in the first place. It’s big, we want that way so we can connect with the most prospective customers possible.
A customer persona strategy, while leveraging market research says clearly “insights you gather from your actual customer base.” It’s a deeper dive into the actuality of your real customers, all the little things you’ve learned about them through weeks, months, and years of having them as customers. Simply put, personas allow you to personalize or target your marketing for different segments of your audience.
How often are we going to market with blanket statements based on the manufacturer’s program with core retail offers attached? Not really moving past broad stroke target audience messaging? I’d guess it’s fairly common, we live in 30-day increments, it would be difficult to break out our marketing to be more defined to different personas. Here’s the rub, it’s not. If you do some simple persona development with all your departments, you may begin to see that you start to convert more customers based on years of relationships you’ve built with your existing ones.
Here are some simple steps to build a customer persona. I feel this layout works best to get you started. Get a working session with a specific department team, and have everyone work through compiling information based on customers they recently sold and have long-standing relationships with. Your CRM will come in very handy here if your staff is populating it properly, as it should be full of relevant data on everyone.
- Name of the persona (use the customer’s first name only)
- Job title
- Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
- Details about their role
- Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Salary/household income
- Location: urban / suburban / rural
- Education
- Family
- Goals and challenges
- Primary goal
- Secondary goal
- How you help achieve these goals
- Primary challenge
- Secondary challenge
- How you help solve these problems
- Values / fears
- Primary values
- Common objections during sales process
It’s a thoughtful exercise that could show you that your dealership has a diverse set of personas. Find the commonality in the team’s work to your core base of personas, that base could be 6 to 10 or higher, and that’s great! You now have a deeper understanding of the people who walk in and out of the dealership every day, as well as those who are looking at your online content, listening to your radio spots, interacting with your social media.
Take these findings, and share them with your internal or external marketing teams and partners. Push them to expand your core messages, and pay more attention to multiple and more finely targeted opportunities that are in front of you with your newfound insights. Look at your last several months of advertising, and take note of whether your store is just pushing the offer or blending your store’s brand and experience into the messaging.
This is an excellent way to separate your dealership from everyone in your market. The challenge is to commit to the exercise, and then make it a necessary part of every piece of content and advertising you create. If you have half a dozen well-defined personas your advertising should be as diverse.
Let the other dealerships move through each sales program with cookie-cutter creative and under-thought messaging. Laser target your audiences with great content that speaks directly to them, and you will see a marked difference.