Crafting a company persona means establishing and leveraging all communications upon an explicit set of emotional and professional characteristics. Ultimately, a company persona influences not only your unique voice and value, but how customers feel and perceive your brand. Creating a company persona may feel tedious, but its impact on customer loyalty is immeasurable.
Step #1 – Create a Compatible Persona and Identity
Essentially, company identity refers to the visual identification of a business, such as a logo and website design. Persona, also called brand personality, is the emotional perception of your company. While these characteristics are presented in differing ways, they are symbiotic by nature. If your company persona and identity feel disjointed, you’ll likely find marketing tactics fail to click with a target demographic. Focus on drafting a persona and identity that work together to solidify your business perception.
Step #2 – Research Competitor Personality Types and Behavior
Identify at least five of your closest competitors. Investigate the persona and identity of each business. What are their levels of communication? How does their tone shift throughout a website or in different contexts? Does their persona shift based on platforms, such as on social media vs. personal blog? By studying competitor persona profiles, it’s easier to understand what your demographic responds to, while ensuring your company persona remains wholly unique.
Step #3 – Involve Team Members in Persona Creation
It’s easy to regard your company as a collective of people, rather than a singular entity. Of course, your company is a collection of individuals. However, each team member works toward the singular goal of supporting business reputation, success and perception. The cornerstone of a consistent brand personality is uniformity among all employees. The greatest brand personas are those crafted by the entire company, not just from one or two individuals. Remember, your company is singular, but its continued success is plural.
Step #4 – Create a Company Style Guide
For many businesses, the notion of crafting a style guide seems unnecessary. Unfortunately, failure to create an official persona style guide often results in uneven tone, incompatible visual designs and an overall lack of brand consistency. Contents of a style guide vary, but generally consist of overarching tone, font choices, primary brand colors and other identifying cues. Adhering to this style guide streamlines content creation and optimizes multi-platform branding.
Step #5 – Define Digital Outreach Methods
It’s easy to obsess over the little details when creating a persona. From the primary tone, color choices and logo designs, if you aren’t careful you’ll soon have a thorough persona without a direction. Defining how your company communicates means more than stylistic choices. A fundamental, but often overlooked, persona pillar is where your company will communicate, not just how. What social media platforms will you use? Will your website have a knowledge base and blog? Will you start guest blogging to raise visibility? Platforms absolutely dictate persona traits. Use this information throughout the creation process.
Step #6 – Customer Service and Company Persona
How will your company respond to customer questions, concerns and feedback? Readily available customer service support is a requirement for all online businesses, especially e-commerce brands. Clearly construct the tone and fundamental persona traits for dealing with customers. Thoroughly defined customer service interactions boost not only experiences, but solidifies your persona on a one-on-one basis. As you may already know, the experience of one customer swiftly become the anticipated experience of countless potential customers.
Step #7 – Strengthening Persona via Company Blog
Think operating a business blog is an archaic tactic for lead generation and SEO? You better think again! With over 77% of internet users turning to blog posts to research topics, find solutions and investigate company value, an underdeveloped blog may be costing you more than you imagine. Business blogs accomplish many things, such as establishing authority, promoting products/services and highlighting your company successes. However, its ability to strengthen and solidify your company persona is its most noteworthy benefit. Use your blog to not only connect with customers but boost persona perception.
Step #8 – Communicate Persona With Video Content
Content delivery is changing. While text-based information remains important, nearly 72% of internet users prefer video over standard text. Failure to leverage video content reduces the likelihood of conversions, subscribers and organic traffic. However, the biggest downside of underutilized video content relates to company persona. Unlike text, video delivers your persona in a dynamic format. By leveraging video, your persona can grow and mature faster than relying on text-only communication.
While you may feel the quality of your products and support is enough to attract customers, as our global marketplace grows, so does the need for individuality. Your company is just as unique as its customers. Ultimately, success in the 21st Century is about customer experience, company values and brand personality.
