Persona Marketing is using a person’s browsing habits, buying apps, app usage and other indicators to identify key demographic indicators and deliver messaging for your brand. Sound scary? Only if it’s not done well.
The Goal is Communication
When a brand is looking at advertising, the goal is to communicate your story to the right person. Finding that right person is the critical part of that goal. When you craft the story, you control the delivery, tone, imagery, and engagement. But how do you get that person to see it? That’s where persona marketing comes in.
Your brand represents a product, service, or offer. You know your customer. It may be a middle-aged father of 2 that owns a marketing company. It may be a thirty-something pet owner that has 3 dogs and lives within a 15-mile radius of your store. Or, it may be several different types of people. This identifying demographic representation is a persona. It is simply stated as a part of someone’s overall life story. That’s what we are after.
Finding Your Persona Online
Identifying the persona of your key demographic is an exercise all it’s own. We will be looking at that in a future post. As for this blog, we are focusing on the mechanics of the marketing.
Once the persona is identified, we begin to look for that person online. This is not a search for someone’s name. Instead, it is more like a tracker looking for clues that our person has been in a particular area. This may be online or in-real-life. Online, we can look at cookies and apps to find that person.
When looking at a persona, we can use app installation on smart devices to match with targets. These apps show a commonality of behavior as well as anticipated habits. As app usage is constantly changing, this can be a great identifier. Now, in case you are wondering, all this is legal and is tracked under the device ID for downloads. We are not getting first-party data that gives name or emails. Instead, we are identifying target devices that belong to our persona.
Additionally, we can look at browsing habits and behavior. Using the aggregated information on site visits and estimated time, we can see patterns develop on subjects of interest, buying decisions, and areas of research. Again, as we are looking at devices and habits we are not gathering information at the individual level of email, physical address, or phone number.
With this information in hand, we can now begin to deliver our message.
Delivering the Message
Once our audience is identified, we begin our ad delivery. This comes in many shapes and sizes. It may be an ad in Facebook in the right rail, a banner on an app, or inline with a featured story on a news site. Again, just as with the identification of your target persona, we make sure that the places your message is displayed match the habits and interests of your target audience.
The Wrap-up
Now that you have a deeper understanding of how this method of targeting works, you will see you are more sensitive to ads appearing and asking why they are there. At Element 502 we know there are a limited number of opportunities to engage with people in a day. To that, we want to make sure you get your message heard and, in turn, deliver the product your brand has come to represent.
