Establishing effective marketing personas using Digital Stack reporting.

Collecting data on how your marketing efforts are performing can be highly valuable as long as you know how to use this information to directly benefit your business. One way to get the most from the accumulated data is creating marketing personas. This will allow you to have a more well-rounded understanding of your ideal customer base.

Defining Franchised Marketing Personas

When thinking about what a persona is from a marketing perspective, the idea can be simplified as building out what your different customers actually look like. We can do this through finding common themes throughout your reporting data. 

In franchise marketing, your parent brand has likely already laid out the groundwork for what your ideal customer base looks like. This is typically determined by the product or service you offer, along with the branding aspects that differentiate you from your competitors. These factors allow you to formulate the baseline structure for targeting your marketing efforts towards a certain consumer base. However, each location within a franchise will have their own unique set of characteristics as well, which will build your distinct target audience.

To accurately determine your location specific customer base, you can use specialized data to formulate these marketing personas. One of the easiest ways to gather this data is through social media analytics. Digital Stack offers insights into key marketing metrics for all of your integrated platforms. This information is then provided to you in a comprehensible way.

Creating Location Specific Personas

This information can then be used to help you begin to visualize your actual customer base rather than just looking at this data in numbers. To begin formulating your various marketing personas, you should look for key insights within the provided data. In this case, you can see specific demographics including gender, age and location.

You can then use this to build out what different customer groups might look like. Let’s use Digital Stack’s Instagram insights to provide two examples of what a persona might look like for this brand.

• Persona 1: A 27-year-old male, who lives in Melbourne, Australia and is active on Instagram in the afternoons.

• Persona 2: A 33-year-old female, who lives in Sydney, Australia and is active on Instagram mostly on the weekends (Saturday and Sunday).

With this knowledge, you can target marketing efforts to reach these different personas. Planning your efforts around these data-based decisions will increase your performance value overall as they are backed by the specific insights to your location. For franchise owners specifically, creating personas by using your customized reports to drive marketing efforts will impact your bottom line.

Once you get comfortable working with the data collected from one platform, begin to incorporate additional information from other sources to form more precise personas. This can include platforms like Facebook or Google My Business. Continue look for opportunities to incorporate and creating more marketing personas in your business efforts moving forward.