Regardless of what type of product marketing you’re talking about, so much of your ultimate success will come down to your ability to get the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time. It really isn’t much more complicated than that. Knowing as much as possible about the people you’re speaking to is obviously one of the keys to this, which is why marketers around the globe have been using buyer personas to great effect for years.
But in truth, buyer personas are a tool – the same as anything else. The tool itself is less important than the larger idea it represents when used properly. In this case, by making an effort to properly align your buyer personas in your printing designs you can make sure that EVERY impression you make with a customer is the strongest one possible.
What Are Buyer Personas?
At its core, a buyer persona is a fictionalized version of your ideal customer that you think about when you sit down to create that stunning print collateral that you’re about to send out in the world. If you know your key demographic is made up of 30 to 40-year-old women with an average of two kids who work from home, for example, you might create the persona of “Molly – a hard-working 37-year-old from Cleveland with a son and a daughter that works in retail.”
The benefit of this is that it gives you someone to picture when you’re making decisions during the content-creation process. If you know as much as you can about the people you need to open a direct line of communication with, you instantly have a better idea of what types of decisions they’ll respond to (and more importantly, which ones they won’t). You would never try to sell to a 65-year-old retiree and a 24-year-old young professional in the exact same way and buyer personas let you create unique content to target groups in a much more personal, direct way – thus increasing your chances of success across the board.
The Message is Everything
Remember that every element of print marketing design ultimately plays a role in how a particular piece of collateral is received. In terms of product marketing, buyer personas can help in a visual way – making sure that everything from product labels to letterhead to even business cards all feel like an accurate representation of the same idea (read: your brand). Every choice you make – from font selection to text size to color scheme, layout and more – needs to begin with the question “what would Customer X think about this?” “How would Customer Y respond to seeing this particular item?” “Is this the absolute way to get Customer Z’s attention?”
This is why we always recommend creating your messaging before you go to print with a manufacturer like us – once you’ve got the right message aligned with the goals of specific people, everything else essentially falls into place pretty naturally. With our new Mark Andy Digital One Digital Press, for example, the possibilities for your items are essentially limitless. This is true not only in terms of design but also versatility – for pressure sensitive labels, for example, we can do fluorescent labels, labels in special shapes, vinyl labels, gold foil and silver foil labels, sheeted and domed labels – the list goes on and on.
But just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD – only by making an effort to understand as much as you can about your audience will you be able to come up with not only the right message but the best way to convey that message to the audience that matters so much to you. Again, it all comes down to a simple question: “what does Customer X want to see and how do they want to see it?” Really, nothing else matters.
In the end, buyer personas are a valuable tool for marketers, period. Success still comes down to your ability to reach out and touch someone at exactly the right moment in their journey with the best technique possible – as a product marketer, buyer personas, therefore, become one of the most powerful weapons in your proverbial arsenal.