This weekend, you’ve got a fantastic meal planned for some friends: you’re making your grandmother’s world-famous spaghetti. You’re at the market, and you’ve grabbed all the ingredients to make her sauce. Next is the pasta. With the basket about full, you grab just a few more things, then head to check out and work your way back home. 

At home, the sauce is simmering on the stove, the noodles are in the water, and the meat is… wait you forgot to get meat at the market! Too late now. “It’ll be fine,” you say. “I can make spaghetti with just sauce and noodles.” Right?

The Missing Ingredient

Every day, campaign managers whip up a marketing recipe out of the basic ingredients: a set budget for the campaign, the right channels for communication, and generic messaging about the brand. Together, these ingredients concoct a meal that’s perhaps filling, but deficient. The missing part? A clear set of well-defined personas – the meat in the digital marketing spaghetti recipe.

Personas are formed by thinking about who your audience is – the specific folks you’re attempting to reach. A good target persona has a vested interest in your product, service, or even your company’s cause. Unfortunately, personas are the ingredient most often forgotten. Without well-defined personas, you’re wasting time and resources reaching people that probably have very little interest in what you’re dishing out.

The Secret Sauce

Digital marketing with well-defined personas hones your efforts to strategically connect with the people who are most likely to engage with your brand, resulting in a delectable and nutritious dinner dish. In addition to saving time and money, defining personas also provides feedback from measurable results. The channels and messages you deploy for your marketing efforts can then be easily adjusted depending on each particular persona’s reach, action, and conversion.

The Power of Defining

Defining personas can also help formulate a trusted customer base, giving you credibility and social proof within a certain audience. For example, let’s say you sell a healthy snack, focusing on 3 different personas within the Crossfit community. With established credibility among your audience, you can now focus the statistics you include in your messaging by using these defined personas to your benefit. When speaking to this particular audience, you can now reference your sales to this group with messaging like the “fastest-growing” or “most-widely adopted.” On the flip side, if you market to everyone interested in general fitness, your message will get lost.

There is always an opportunity to go broad with your messaging, but it may not be cost-effective for your brand or particular timeline.

Serving Up Strategy

At HMG Creative, a digital marketing strategy has a recipe that includes five key components: Personas, Channels, Messages, Timeline, & Budget.

Here is an example of some of the demographics and psychographics the HMG Creative Marketing Strategy serves up to clients.

In this scenario, digital marketing agencies are the chefs. They are the experts and they’ve got the recipes for the perfect pasta. Well, you know what we mean. If you’re curious about getting in touch with an expert or seeing who’s out there, you can find some of the Top Digital Agencies here!