I grew up in southern Ohio, in the midst of the Appalachian foothills where light pollution was minimal and the sky rewarded us each clear night with millions of stars, including the brilliant band of the Milky Way galaxy. On clear, cool nights, my younger brother and I would drag my fully-reclinable, pink and purple outdoor lounge chair into the middle of the backyard, wrap ourselves together in a blanket and lay side-by-side gazing up at the dazzling show of twinkling lights. Depending on the time of year and the tilt of the Earth’s axis, we loved identifying constellations like the Big and Little Dipper, The 7 Sisters, Draco, and Orion. We’d get out the telescope, squint one eye, and take turns peering at the crater’s of the moon and Saturn’s rings. Every once in a while, we’d get lucky and see a meteor shower and make dozens of wishes on shooting stars that seemed like they were showing off just for us.
Each night the sky seemed to put on a new show, but there was always one constant character – the North Star. The North Star can be seen every night of the year from the northern hemisphere and barely moves due to its location above the axis on which the earth rotates. For millennia, it’s been used to orient travelers and help them find their way to discover new lands, to experience new adventures, and learn new things. It’s been immortalized in myths, legends, maps, art, historical documentation, and just-for-fun stories that have been passed down for generations.
In modern day storytelling and strategy, setting your own North Star – the person to whom you are speaking and trying to sell your product or service – provides purpose, stability, and direction to your messages. In a brilliant sky filled with millions of unique and always on-the-go people, who is the one that should be holding your focus?
It’s sometimes hard to find the North Star, as it’s not the brightest one in the sky. You need an expert to help you not only find your North Star, but help you develop a plan to keep your eyes focused on the right star despite all of the twinkling, moving, bright stars nearby. Crafted Voice Communications can help you keep your focus on your North Star. Let’s work together to find the one star who wants to hear your story, is motivated to build a relationship with you, and keeps coming back to you, time-and-time again.
Your North Star: A Customer Persona
In marketing language, this North Star is called a persona. It’s a representation of your target audience or customer, and provides you with everything you need to know to effectively communicate with a similar group of people.
A customer persona is a tool used within an effective communications strategy to target the most relevant audience for your business. A customer persona answers the questions: who is my message speaking to? Where do they hang out? What do they care about? Why do they need my product or service?
This persona should include a name, a photo, demographic information, motivators, goals, challenges, inspiration, and a short biography.
Here is one of three Crafted Voice personas that we developed to drive all of our communications and business decisions.
How Many Personas Do I Need?
For Crafted Voice, we have three personas. All three are business owners, but accommodate for the varying levels of business development they might fall under. We speak differently to moms who have a side-hustle business than to established business owners who are staffed with 3-5 employees. We know who each of these groups are because of the extensive research and development, paired with our experience and on-the-ground knowledge, that went into developing our North Star customer personas.
How To Find Your North Star: Building A Customer Persona
Building a true North Star customer persona involves a lot of research, sleuthing through data, and expert analysis. It’s not a good idea to write a persona based solely on your own thoughts, experience, and gut-feelings. Incorrect assumptions and unconscious bias might slip in, leading you astray from finding your true North Star. Web analytics, keyword research, census data, surveys, social media insights, focus groups, and 1:1 interviews are a few examples of places you can collect data to feed into your personas. Once you’ve collected the data, a communications and marketing expert can analyze the data to synthesize, summarize, and curate the various sections of the persona. This is also the time to decide how many personas you need to create. It’s OK to let the data, combined with your own experience, guide this decision.
Do You Have Confidence In Your North Star Persona?
You need to be absolutely sure that the persona you are building is going to serve you as a true North Star. If you are wrong and choose a different star, you’ll be headed in the wrong direction with a communications strategy and messaging that doesn’t support your business goals. The team at Crafted Voice would love to help you discover and chart your true North Star. Or, if you already have your North Star customer persona, you may be asking, “what next?” Great question. Creating a strategic communications strategy, including crafting your brand’s voice and mapping out the customer’s journey is the next step.
We help businesses like yours laser focus on their target audience, set up an effective communications strategy, and transform their message into a vibrant, colorful story. Contact us today to learn more about how partnering with us will help you reach your professional and business goals.