Do you have a clear idea of what your business’s buyer personas are? Establishing the buyer persona, which is also called audience or marketing persona, can help businesses determine the type of content that would resonate with their ideal customers.
The buyer persona is a representation of your target market, crafted from research and data collected as consumers interact with your business.
This fictional representative embodies your best potential customers’ characteristics. They’re given a name, interests, goals, and buying patterns. Some companies even pair these personas with photos to further solidify their identity.
Given that products or services are used by different groups of people, a brand usually needs to create more than one buyer persona to accommodate the various segments of its customer base.
While crafting personas for different buyer segments can seem like a lot of work, setting them can help you make better marketing and content decisions, which can positively impact on your business.
The Value of Buyer Persona
Using buyer personas can greatly affect your marketing success. A study conducted by MarketingSherpa found that using buyer personas can lead to an exponential increase in factors like length of visit, page visits, and marketing-generated revenue.
More than just being a marketing tool, a well-thought-out buyer persona can also help you zero in on qualified prospects and focus on finding ways to address your target customers better. To help you direct attention to the right customers, you can even come up with negative buying personas that can guide you in identifying customers you don’t want.
Simply put, building a buyer persona helps you have a better understanding of your customers. This allows you to craft campaigns and content and develop products or services that help you meet your target audience’s needs, behaviors, and expectations. A buyer persona lets you see your business from a different perspective—from that of a customer’s.
Crafting a Buyer Persona
Here are some basic steps you can follow in creating a buyer persona. You can go the old-fashioned way and generate physical profiles and mockups or you can use templates to make the process more efficient:
- Do your research
Find out everything you can about your target customers using real-world data. Consider details like age, location, daily journey, spending patterns, media touchpoints, social channels, beliefs, and interests. Use information derived from social media analytics, market landscaping, backyard research, and your customer.
- Make informed speculations
In cases where it’s difficult to gather data about your audience, you can make educated guesses that answer questions like the following:
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- What can your product do for your customers?
- What circumstances will convince them to buy your product?
- How will they go about buying your product?
- Learn from your competitors
Try to find out what your competitors have already done when it comes to customer research. There are several online tools that you can use to make this process simpler and quicker.
When creating a buyer persona that has depth, you need to include elements such as:
- Day in the life scenarios
Creating a consumer journey scenario lets you imagine what a day in a target customer’s life is like. Also consider the character’s relationship with other buyers, which may require you to come up with more personas.
- Specific objectives
Setting clear objectives can help content creators come up with relevant content that’s specifically geared towards your target audience.
- Main problems
Crafting an effective persona entails detailing your persona’s main problems through well-defined terms.
- Specific questions
Consider questions that your persona might ask along the way. Instead of using general queries, like “What makes your product different?”, try to come up with more specific inquiries, such as “With my current situation, why should I choose to purchase your product/use your service?”, and other precise insight-generating prompts.
Questions like this pave the way for even more questions, giving you the opportunity to better engage with your potential customers. By using specific questions, you not only become more informed about your target audience, but you would also be able to tell them more about your company.
