Hello again!

Today we’re dropping some knowledge like it’s hot. As a brand strategist and designer, there are so many things that I keep in mind when contacting potential clients and communicating with current clients. So, I thought I’d tell you all about it in another value-filled post here at The Mood Lab.

Client (or customer) personas are a tool that strategists use to establish focused targeting. This is basically an exercise where we define, deeply, who we are speaking to, who we are serving, who our tribe would be. The elements included here (psychographics, communication methods, etc) are a few of the things we need to answer when we build client personas.

Psychographics

It’s not enough to ask fact-based questions. Go deeper and ask more abstract, open-ended questions such as brand affiliations, struggles and pain points, what success means to your audience, and so on and on. No question is too big or too small and digging deep is so important here. You don’t want to just go 50%, you want to cover it all and create a big picture, filled with ideas, info, creativity and even a little bit of crazy, if available.

As psychographics are all about psychology, it’s important to understand your target audience.  What keeps them up at night, what are they struggling with, why can’t they find the right person to help them alleviate their problems. Digging into these questions will help you understand your audience and will elevate your ideas and solutions to a high level.

Preferred methods of communication

Find your tribe and learn the language! It’s important to know where your tribe hangs out and how they like to communicate. People tend to skew more towards emails than calls and some prefer a quick text to an email. Others mainly communicate through social media so figuring out where your tribe (ideal client & audience) hangs out is crucial. This will help you to explore it all: design formats, marketing funnels, customer journey, and even your advertising budget. So, do the research and start heading over and connecting with your people, the way they like to!

Source of knowledge

Wow, more research! Exciting, right? The word ‘research’ can have some seriously negative connotations for some business owners, but really, it’s a piece of cake and can be a game changer for your business. Knowing where our audience consumes their information helps us to identify where we should prioritize for maximum exposure. Do they get it from news channels, social media, fellow business owners? It’s a good idea to aim to craft the same standard of contents which already exist on the platform they already consume.

Again, do the research and start looking into where your audience can be found and gather some knowledge on where to increase your visibility. A good idea here is also to collaborate with other people and experts in your industry to get exposure from their audience. This way you don’t have to start from zero. These people are already consuming similar information (thus are considered warmer leads) and they may benefit from what you offer.

Propose a solution to ease their struggles

How do we plan to solve our audience pain points? What part of our business can be utilised to solve their problems? This assists us to build a link between what our audience needs and our expertise. What use is expertise if you can’t use it, right? Dig deep into what your client needs. Ask all of the questions and then ask some more. You want to make sure you cover all of your bases and that nothing gets looked over! Also, have a look at this post for some great tips on authentic branding!

Did you get our last couple of newsletters? Sure hope you did, because man, oh man was it filled with some great tips for you. If you’re not signed up for our newsletter, drop an email to hello@themoodlab.co with your email address and we’ll sign you right up. We often share freebies, client wins and loads of valuable info on branding and graphic design!

Until next time!