Marketing to Multiple Customer Personas

Most small business owners get started with a general understanding of the types of customers they’re trying to attract. Maybe it’s other small business owners, SaaS companies, middle-aged adults, or Gen Z. Maybe you’ve even done an ideal client exercise or two and have guessed their favorite coffee order.

Having that focus is a great starting point, but there comes a time when you realize your marketing needs a little more differentiation. Each customer has different problems to solve and unique needs, and maybe you’re even starting to offer different services or products to serve different personas within your audience.

That’s where your customer personas come into play. By understanding the nuances within your audience, you can create marketing and sales strategies that are much more specific. It’s a win-win for everyone!

Here’s what we’ll dig into:

What are customer personas and why do they matter?

Identify your key personas
Customize your messaging
Choose the right channels based on your personas
Prioritize based on business goals
Test, analyze, and adjust

What Are Customer Personas and Why Do They Matter?

First, let’s cover what we mean by customer personas. Your customer personas are basically individual profiles about who your customers are, what they are trying to do, and what they need to do it.

Putting together these personas matters for business owners because the information tells you how to market to them and convert them into paying customers. Think of it as a way to step into their shoes so you can better understand how to talk to them in a way that really clicks!

Identify Your Key Personas

To put together your personas, you need to start by collecting your customer information. You can start with the hunches you might have, but the more useful profiles will come from your existing customers and the analytics you already have. Trust us—your real-life customers will surprise you.

Whenever you start or finish a project or complete a sale, you can send a quick survey to gather:

How they found you
Their pain points
Their goals
Their preferred communication channels
Their preferred content types
Any objections they might have to purchasing from you

You can also document the following information that you probably already have through working with them. Things like:

How much they paid or what their budget was
Age (can be an approximation if you don’t capture birthdays)
Gender
Location
Occupation or job title

As you document your customer data, you should start to see patterns and similarities. Ultimately, you don’t want to end up with a unique persona for every single customer you work with (that sounds like a nightmare to manage!), but you should notice some patterns.

Pro-tip: Try to develop a customer persona for each of your main services or products since each of those solves a different problem.

All of this information will start to make up their demographics, psychographics (their values, interests, and motivations), pain points, and goals, which go into creating your customer personas.

Customize Your Messaging

You’ve probably noticed by now that your customers fall into multiple customer personas. Most of the small businesses we talk to have between 1-3 “groups” of customers that they are marketing to at any given time!

For example, if you’re a wedding planner, you have:

Couples who are just engaged and don’t know what they need yet
Couples who are actively looking for a full-service wedding planner and designer
Couples who are hoping to find someone who offers month-of coordination so they can stay present on their wedding day.

Or if you’re a website designer, you have:

Clients who have an existing website and want to make updates to it
Clients who have outgrown their website and want to use a template to build a new one
Clients who want to start from scratch and hire you to design something totally custom for them

Do you see how marketing might look different for each of them?

With each persona, you’ll need to customize your messaging and positioning. This is where the magic happens! For each persona, write down:

Your key value proposition - In one sentence, what is the main value you’re providing to this audience?
The pain points you’re solving - What are the main pain points you’ve gathered that you know you can solve?
Your primary talking points - What are some of the emotional benefits you offer that you can weave into sales calls or marketing materials?
Your tone and style - While your brand voice should stay consistent, what tone and style should you take for each persona?
The benefits and features you’re offering - What features, services, and benefits align with this audience?
Your differentiators - What makes you stand out from the competition?

Keep in mind that your messaging still needs to be tied back to your business, so you don’t need to start thinking about all the content you can create based on their likes and interests. No more “I like coffee too” kind of messaging required. Keep it focused on what they need to see, hear, and feel to make a purchase with you.

Choose the Right Channels Based on Your Personas

The last piece of marketing to multiple customer personas is determining where to market to them. We usually recommend you ask people where they found you (so that you’re not guessing) but if you don’t have this information yet, you can also do some research online!

For instance, millennial creative business owners are likely on Instagram, Gen Z is clutching to TikTok while it lasts, and LinkedIn is probably the best place to communicate to professionals or corporate stakeholders.

Prioritize Based on Business Goals

Now that we’ve talked a lot about creating multiple customer personas, we have to say this—don’t start marketing all at once to every single persona. That’ll be overwhelming for you, hard to track, and probably not the best marketing strategy anyway.

Instead, prioritize your marketing efforts based on your business goals. Maybe you want to increase sales with your highest-value persona first, then work on capturing an audience that you’d like to grow.

You can also consider marketing to a specific persona based on seasons and trends. Small business owners might resonate with more marketing messaging at the beginning of the year as they’re building and planning, while bigger companies might be best to market to around September when they’re doing their fiscal planning.

If you need a little help, make sure to try Enji’s Marketing Strategy Generator to get an actionable list of marketing activities you can prioritize based on your business goals!

Test, Analyze, and Adjust

At the end of the day, like with any marketing strategy, marketing to your customers isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. You can always refine your messaging, offers, and campaigns.

Take a look at your marketing analytics and business analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t. If your messaging is resonating, you might be getting more customers within your target personas and more engagement on the channels you’re using. If the data doesn’t seem as promising, maybe there are gaps. Enji’s KPI Dashboard is a great way to focus on the data that matters the most and monitor everything in one place. With more data, you can focus on testing, analyzing, and adjusting as needed.