Today, jewelry designers and most crafters are experiencing more visibility than ever before. This means that more individuals than ever are selling their own handmade accessories online. What sets each person apart is their individual aesthetic and the style of jewelry that they design. How I approach jewelry design, and the necklace I ultimately make won’t necessarily work for every person.
This means that it’s important to know who you are serving when you design your jewelry. The jewelry that I create will appeal to a different crowd than those who do intricate wirework. At the end of the day, this isn’t only ok, it’s critical to our survival as business owners. But because of the saturation in the market, one of the most powerful weapons you can do as a business owner is to truly know your target audience.
One of the techniques that successful marketers do is to create a target persona. This persona is critical to appropriately speaking to the audience, from social media post to email campaign. Target personas, sometimes called buyer personas, can also be beneficial for jewelry designers. After all, understanding who you’re designing for and making sure your new necklace design will be a hit with your buyers can be just as important as correctly talking to them in a product description.
How do you Create a Target Persona?
There’s no easy way to say this: to create a target persona you will need to do research, analysis, take a close look at the people who are currently buying from you. Yes, this seems like a lot of upfront work, but it will be well worth it in the end.
The easiest way to conduct the necessary research is to create a survey asking a series of questions from your customers. Make sure that when you’re writing the questions you are making them specific to your business. Understand their needs as customers, and why they shop with you.
Get to know what they appreciate about your design style. Add questions about what styles of jewelry they like, what materials they enjoy wearing, what styles of designs they like and dislike that you design.
Next, seek to understand what messaging they enjoy from you. Pull product descriptions and ask if these customers enjoy the way you describe your jewelry designs. Ask if they like the marketing promotion you have around your jewelry or if they need to receive information in a different way than they have been. If they see you at specific craft shows, ask them what they like about the venue or space.
Ultimately be as specific as possible, and focus on the why or motives of your customers versus their actions. Make sure your questions seek to understand their goals and motivations.
Next, you’ll want to distribute your survey to customers, both past, and present. To encourage participation, offer a discount or enter participants into a drawing to win a prize. Encourage feedback and work hard to get as much as possible as you can.
Build Your Personas
Once you have all your responses back it’s time to start analyzing the data. There will be a lot, so one of the easiest ways to begin organizing your feedback is by grouping similar answers. These similarities help show you who your different personas are.
Once you’ve grouped the data, you’ll begin building out the individual personas. To build out a target persona you’ll want to be as detailed as possible. A few important details to include:
- Give your persona a name (and even a photo to go along with the data)
- Include important demographic information (age, salary, relationship status, etc)
- Use real quotes from the interviews you conducted to further illustrate their wants, needs, likes, and dislikes about your jewelry
You can also opt to include a section for how you plan to promote to these individuals in the future. If they like specific design elements, include how you can incorporate these in the future. Further, if this person prefers to receive information using a specific channel, include any marketing plans you have to reach this person.
Build the persona out into a one-page document you can reference as often as needed. Don’t be afraid to be specific; this information is meant to help you market your jewelry better and ensure you’re designing jewelry that your buyers will love!
What questions do you have about target personas? What do you think you’ll learn about your customers? Share all your questions and comments below!