Author: Julia Kendrick
Customers and their needs and motivations lie at centre of every business in the aesthetics, beauty and wellbeing industries. A solid understanding of your target customers, alongside a carefully planned and executed PR strategy to engage with them is crucial to commercial success. However, not all customers are alike and savvy brand owners will segment their audiences by creating target audience personas for more effective targeting. By creating a set of different customer personas, you can create tailored messaging and PR campaigns that resonate with each persona and build trust, loyalty and more!
In this article, Julia Kendrick explains the value of target audience personas in the world of beauty PR and shares guidance to help you create tailored personas for your business.
What is a target audience persona?
Target audience personas or profiles are a fantastic business tool to help you gain a better understanding of your customers. In a crowded marketplace like aesthetics, beauty or wellness – it is essential to understand who you are selling to and why!
A target audience persona is a fictional representation of each of your customer groups that helps visualise their needs, habits, motivations, and objectives. Each ‘persona’ is a detailed profile of an ideal customer and may include:
- Demographic information (age, gender, income, job etc.)
- Problems or challenges
- Interests or hobbies
- Motivations
- Values
- Lifestyle
- Attitudes
And more!
The amount of information included in a target audience profile is entirely up to you and will depend upon your PR goals and business needs. Alongside understanding the differences between their demographics and psychometrics, you also need to uncover which channels each customer uses to stay informed.
The value of target audience personas /why are they important
Adopting a one-size-fits-all approach with your PR strategy is a risky approach and can alienate or ignore key customer groups. With a set of target audience personas in your PR toolkit, your brand team can:
- Understand your target audience better
- Hone your PR outreach in high-performing channels
- Create more engaging and compelling messages
- Improve conversion rates to enquiries and sales
- Stand out versus competitors
- Build trust and loyalty
- Enjoy more impact amongst your target audiences!
How to build your target audience personas
The context for audience personas between brands and business varies widely however, there are certain elements or factors that most personas consider. Below are six key questions to help you build your target audience personas for your beauty, aesthetics or wellness brand:
1. What are their demographics? The first and often easiest place to start with your target audience personas is demographics. For each, list out their age range, household income, location, profession, gender etc.
2. What are their needs? Your goal is to identify “what do they need or want”? Do they have a problem you can solve? For example, your target audience persona may have a specific skincare concern they want to manage, or they could be time poor and need a quick fix. It’s also useful to consider how frequent their needs are i.e. daily, weekly, monthly etc. For every persona, list 3-5 key needs they are most likely to have and rank them in order of importance.
3. Why do they want the above? It’s crucial to understand the emotional and physical drivers behind their needs and what motivates them. For example, do they want to feel or look a certain way? Do they want to spend less time on one thing and more on another? Do they love to keep abreast of the latest trends and embrace newness? Understanding their “why” is crucial when devising your PR and marketing messages.
4. What do they value? I also recommend considering what is important to each target audience persona. For example, in the aesthetics, beauty and wellness industries – trust and reputation are key amongst many of our consumers! Think about what your target personas value and note it down on each profile so that you can address it later with your brand and PR comms.
5. Is location important? If you’re a clinic owner, this question is definitely for you. However, all brand owners should consider where there target audiences live and work so that they can tailor their PR and comms strategy to attract them.When it comes to location consider it in terms of convenience and timing (i.e. when is your target customer likely to be able to enjoy your products or services?). For example, an aesthetics clinic wanting to target professional women aged 25-35 may struggle if they are only open Monday to Friday 9 to 5.
6. What might they look like? This is the fun part, find a stock image online that best represents each target audience persona that your brand wants to connect with. Are they smiley/glamorous/sophisticated/tired? Once you have a photo don’t forget to give them a name, you’ll start to build a strong relationship with each persona as you evolve your PR strategy.
Once you’ve collated your answers to the above questions you can begin to create a set of target audience personas. I recommend three personas to start with and you can add more as and when your business evolves. Personas are a living concept and should be updated over time to ensure relevancy versus changing marketing conditions.
With each persona or profile completed, it’s time for you and your team to get very familiar with them! They will sit at the centre of your PR strategy and should be considered before sharing any message from your brand.
How to use target personas in your PR strategy
Effective communication is at the heart of every successful PR strategy and the first step is to gain an in-depth understanding of your target customers through creating target audience personas. By making your personas representative of a real-life person, you can work out how best to create a PR campaign that best engages with and motivates them.
Target personas are crucial part of campaign planning and help you to develop your key brand messages. When planning any PR campaign, event or activity you should always ask “who is this for and what will they think of it?” The key is to align these answers with your PR goals! At every point of contact with your brand, you can ensure your target customer receives an appropriate message and is nudged further along their purchase journey.
We specialise in winning PR strategies
At Kendrick PR, we thrive on creating winning formulas of strategic and tactical support for premium beauty brands, aesthetic clinics, and practitioners. Founded in 2015 by award-winning communications expert Julia Kendrick, Kendrick PR are an experienced and passionate team with an excellent reputation. From PR Consultancy to Brand Development, we have delivered outstanding results for some of the industry’s most innovative brands and exciting entrepreneurs, such as Cynosure, Debbie Thomas, The Private Clinic, Oxygenetix, and Medik8 – and we’d love to support your brand. Please get in touch to book a discovery call with us.