For health and wellness professionals, developing your brand persona is an important exercise to help you gain a foothold in your market. After all, before you can even hope to connect with your target, you first need to know who you are.
This is the essence of a brand persona.
What is a brand persona?
Before we go any further, it’s important to make the distinction between a brand and buyer persona, as these two can often become confused.
Buyer persona
The buyer persona represents the kind of person you think your business would best serve. It involves creating a fictional individual with a name, personal interests, and any other relevant details to get into the mindset of a typical person from your target audience.
Brand persona
Now, this is much more to do with you and your company. People can come into contact with your company in many different ways. This could be through your social media, blog, website, or even your physical store.
And every single time, the experience has to feel like you are dealing with the same company. You need to ensure that certain characteristics of your business are always present to the customer. The key to an effective brand persona is authenticity and being true to what your business actually stands for.
It’s also important to note that a brand persona is just one aspect of the overall brand identity, which includes your logo, color scheme, and other brand elements. The brand persona just answers the question:
If my business was a person, who would it be?
The benefits of creating a brand persona
By taking the time to create a brand persona, you can help transform your marketing efforts and provide a more consistent, customer-focused experience.
A consistent tone of voice
This may sound simple but overlooking your tone of voice can have negative consequences and be really jarring for the customer.
Imagine you have a friend who is shy, quiet, and polite in person. Now, imagine that every time you speak to that person on the phone, they shout and swear—but only on the phone. It’s as if they’re two different people. If your brand doesn’t have a consistent tone of voice, this is what can happen. And it’s something a brand persona can fix.
Net Promoter Score
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a common Key Performance Indicator that tells you how your business is doing based on customer feedback on a scale of 1–10. It generally goes:
- Brand enthusiasts: 9–10
- Sufficiently satisfied: 7–8
- Brand detractors: 0–6
The reason this is so important is because existing customers are much more valuable to your business than new ones and unhappy customers will complain about you, making it more difficult to get new customers.
By developing a good brand persona, you are creating a human connection with your target. In becoming someone your customers identify with, you can provide a better, more consistent experience, improving retention—and avoiding customer churn.
Understanding your brand: How to create a persona
Building upon branding layers
We mentioned above that a brand persona is just one aspect of your overall branding initiative. Here’s where that becomes important.
As a rule of thumb, every business should have a mission statement, promise, essence, and pillars. Now, you have to dig deeper into these elements to find the common characteristics that are present in each.
If this sounds a little too “up in the air,” a good starting-off point is to ask yourself “how is my company different from my competitors?” This will help you find what makes you unique and will inform the characteristics of your brand persona.
Customer, customer, customer
After looking inward, it’s time to look outward—specifically at who you’re targeting. Your brand isn’t just about who you are, but also about how you’re perceived by those you’re trying to connect with.
Assuming you’ve created a buyer persona, you ideally want to know that the buyer persona and the brand persona would have a positive relationship. It doesn’t matter if the relationship would be friends, parent-child, or person-pet, as long as it is positive and pertains to your product or service, it can be successful.
Top tip: A good way to establish the relationship your company has with its customers is to base it on a brand archetype.
Get creative
We’ve spoken up until now as the brand persona as a kind of “person.” But there’s no reason they have to be.
What’s important is that they represent the characteristics of your brand in an effective and engaging way that gives off reliability. Animals are a good example as we naturally give them certain traits. For example:
- Dogs are loyal, reliable
- Owls are wise
- Horses are strong, dependable
Then again, you may decide that your brand persona is more effectively represented by a mascot, whether a cartoon version of your product or anything else.
The point is, there’s no right or wrong answer here, as long as you find an accurate and easy-to-understand way to represent your brand.
Developing a brand persona can be an incredible asset in ensuring a consistent brand experience among your target audience. But it is just one step in a larger process of developing your brand identity.
If you would like help developing your brand identity, reach out to us today to find out more about our services.
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