When it comes to being successful online, it’s all about making real connections. You want
people to feel something about your company and your brand. You want them to feel
differently about themselves, and you want them to create a relationship that feels genuine
with you. To accomplish this, you need two things. The first is great customer service, the
second is an engaging online persona. With both, you can engage with your audience and
build a community that responds to you and is loyal to you. To create this engaging online
persona, all you need to do is follow this guide:
Know Who Your Demographic is and How They Communicate
The first step to creating an engaging persona is knowing who you are talking to. Creating a
persona that will appeal to one demographic is useless if that demographic is not buying
from you. You need to know who uses your product or service and study your competition
who also sells to them. See who is the most successful at engaging with them online, and try
to copy what works for them. Building up your own persona will take time, after all, and you
need to start somewhere.
Know What Kind of Narrative You Want to Tell
You don’t, however, want to copy everything from your competition. That is why you need to
combine communication cues with the narrative that you want to tell. This narrative does not
need to be something complicated. What your goal is can be your narrative, but so too can
be your stance on certain issues. Combine who you are and what your goal is into your
digital persona to give people a clear idea of who you are as a company. Remember, you
don’t need to create a fake personality, just a brand persona that you and your employees
can use to create a uniform experience for your customers.
Create Your Branding
The next step to formalizing your brand identity is to create your branding. This will include
creating your aesthetic, your logo, and even your tagline. Depending on how much budget
you have, you can either use automated tools like this tagline generator, or you can hire a
professional to create your branding for you. As your brand identity will likely be fine-tuned
as you build up your audience, it can be a great idea to start with free tools until you have a
clear idea of what you want.
Be Communicative and Engaging
Finally, all that is left is to build your audience. Be communicative and engaging, respond to
comments, share posts, host giveaways and generally be active in the community you want
to sell to. Use their feedback, both directly and indirectly by using analytics, to fine-tune your
efforts until you have created an engaging online persona for users to connect with your
brand.
A brand persona is a critical component of online marketing because it allows users to
humanize your company and create closer bonds with it. The better your brand persona, the
better you can create a uniform experience across all platforms.
About: Steve Conway is a content marketing professional and inbound marketing expert. Previously, Steve worked as a marketing manager for a tech software start-up. He is passionate about discovering new software that will advance his already well-honed digital marketing techniques.
