Marketing Personas & Their Impact on Your Advertising Plan

Marketing personas are a way for your dealership to connect on a personal level with your potential consumers. These personas allow you to relate to a consumer’s personality to create a positive interaction with your brand and its vehicle models. Personas can take some research and in-depth questions to really understand both who your audience is, and what speaks to which target demographic. Through this blog, you can see if a marketing persona approach fits within your advertising plan.

Using personas creates a very targeted approach to engaging potential customers who are interested in your dealership. Since there are many different personalities in the world, you will have to find a common theme and group individuals together based on their similar responses to your questions, as well as their characteristics.

You will typically come up with two to three types of personas per model of vehicle. For example, if your model is a 4-door sedan and you have gathered information from focus groups, surveys, and interviews with customers, you can group the responses to come up with three fictional audience personas to target your vehicle to. Mary, the single mother with two kids who is very safety conscious; Ted, the single university graduate looking a car to get to and from work; and finally, Rebecca, the married mom of one child that needs a vehicle to get her child to sporting events.

You can use these three audience personas to build a journey roadmap of how each fictional persona would go through the process of discovering, purchasing, and using your 4-door sedan. This roadmap will show different points of interaction your dealership can and may have with the potential consumer, and allow you to see what advertising, marketing platform, or method would work best for each persona at each interaction point.

Finally, you can develop an empathy roadmap which will assist you in understanding how your persona will have to deal with certain roadblocks and challenges when purchasing your 4-door sedan. Is it affordable for Mary, our single mother of two? Does it have enough flair or performance for Ted, our young university grad? Does it have the safety features that Rebecca craves? Creating a hypothetical situation for your three personas will allow you to learn how you can create a purchasing funnel that is easy and smooth for your consumer. Marketing personas may not fit in every dealership’s marketing plan, but they are a way to connect with your potential customers on a deeper level. Below are some pros and cons of marketing personas that you can use to determine if marketing personas are right for your dealership.

Pros of Marketing Persona’s

• Creates a deep connection and interaction with your dealership’s target audience.
• Allows you to map out certain touchpoints on where you can connect with your audience best.
• Creates a funnel to gain in-depth knowledge of your dealership’s target market through surveys, focus groups, and interviews.
• Allows you to create certain marketing campaigns and advertisements at each stage of the discovering and purchasing process to develop a smooth process of purchase for your dealership.

Cons of Marketing Persona’s

• With marketing personas, it is easy to overanalyze and develop an abundant list of possibilities. When using these in your advertising you must really be aware of the data.
• The creation of marketing personas can be time consuming with the research involved.
• There are certain limitations regarding inclusion of other marketing possibilities when using marketing personas for your dealership.

In conclusion, marketing personas may not be for everyone, but they are an excellent tool for your marketing and advertising as a way to create a positive and lasting connection with consumers looking to purchase a vehicle from your dealership.