How to Increase Your Marketing Return On Investment Through Customization and Multiple Personas

The biggest mistake most first-time marketers make is attempting a "one-size fits all" approach to their marketing efforts. They launch one campaign, sent with the same message, to all people. That may work for something that has mass appeal, across all demographics (e.g., promoting ice cream). But, for most of us, we are trying to laser into a very specific target customer. Or, more likely, target customers (plural), each with a different focus. That is when you need to build different target customer personas, segment your lists and customize your marketing messaging to each of those different sub-segments. Allow me to explain in these two examples, one for a B2C business and the other for a B2B business.

A B2C persona-building case study

Let's say you are a manufacturer of mattresses and you offer three different tiers of quality, the basic product from $499, the medium grade from $1,299 and the higher grade from $1,999 for a queen size mattress. One marketing option is to market all of your mattresses to all potential buyers and hope for success. A better option is to build a unique persona for each tier.