What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a profile of your ideal customer, created based on several different types of data. Typically, companies establish a primary persona and then create secondary personas as well. These personas provide information that is reflective of both existing customers and ideal future customers.
Why Do You Need A Buyer Persona?
In 2021, every online space is crowded with ads and sponsored posts. To make sure your marketing stands out from the crowd, it’s essential that you develop a strategy that’s informed by strong, accurate buyer personas.
For copywriters to write strong ads and for graphic designers to create compelling visuals, they need as much information as you can provide. Buyer personas help take the masses of information that you’ve gathered and make them more digestible.
Buyer personas should influence all your marketing efforts – and we mean all. From the copy on your website and ads to the topics you discuss in phone conversations, every aspect of your marketing strategy should be informed by your buyer personas.
Through interviews, research, insights gained from analytics, and conversations with employees, you can begin to sketch an outline of your buyer personas. When you put your buyer personas into action, you’ll start to see your marketing efforts succeed more frequently.
Gather Your Research
To create an accurate buyer persona, it’s essential to learn as much as you can about your existing customers. To do this, you can email out surveys, post polls to your social media accounts, and directly contact your best customers to learn about who they are and what they love about your products.
While learning from individual customers is extremely important, it’s not the only factor to consider. Spend some time reading your social media and Google analytics. Look for patterns and see what you can learn about who your customers really are. You might think your target market is millennials, but if your customers are mostly Gen Xers, then your buyer personas should reflect that important distinction.
You should also take the time to speak with your employees. What have they learned about who your customers are and what they value? What have they determined about customers’ wants and needs?
Spend time thoroughly researching your existing customers before diving into the buyer persona creation process. Your personas are only as useful if they are developed using accurate information.
Key Categories
After you’ve gathered as much information as possible about your existing customers, it’s time to figure out just who your ideal customers are. You should start by developing your primary persona, and that profile should be shared with the whole company.
To develop your buyer persona, you will need to determine these key details about your ideal customer:
- Background
- Demographics
- Career
- Hobbies
- Goals and Motivations
- Biggest Fears
- Challenges or Pain Points
Each of these categories contains useful information that will help you sketch an outline of who you’re trying to attract.
While background, demographics, career, and hobbies are extremely important, the last three categories contain that information that helps the marketing team craft a message that truly hits home.
If there’s a way for you to show how your product will help your ideal customer achieve their goals, then that needs to be a part of your campaign. For instance, for a fishing company that sells high-quality baits, their ad campaign should show just how their baits can help fishermen reach their catch goals.
Motivation is a major opportunity for marketers to hook leads. For example, if your survey data reveals that your customers are motivated to help the environment, then perhaps it’s time for some company policy changes that are pro-environment. Those policy changes will offer the perfect opportunity for you to create ads that reflect those changes and show your ideal customer why they should purchase from you.
Fears, challenges, and pain points are also essential avenues that marketers can explore to generate new leads and to move leads through the sales funnel. If there’s room for a product to ease a customer’s pain, then that ad should be a key component of your marketing strategy.
How Can You Use Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas help you understand your current customers and potential new customers, better than if you were looking at data alone. By developing strong buyer personas, you can take out the guesswork and allow you to market more effectively.
Another important reason to develop buyer personas is that they are helpful at every stage of the marketing funnel. When you have a buyer persona based on the typical lead which comes from Facebook, you can make sure you develop an ad just for that type of individual: based on their buyer persona. You can also focus on developing an ad campaign that’s targeted at your primary persona, who might be an existing customer, or perhaps for a customer who comes looking for just one specific product.
Buyer personas don’t just help you develop strong marketing campaigns. They can also inform product development and change current customer service practices as well
In Conclusion…
When you know what makes your customers tick, you can develop personas that actually work.
Take the time to read through your analytics, survey existing customers, and interview your employees about who your customers are and what kind of customer they’d like to see more of.
Then, develop a primary persona that can be used as a baseline for your marketing efforts. As you gather more information, develop more secondary personas. Craft specific campaigns that target each different persona, and put those ads into action.
There’s so much information available, and many people are willing to share more. Take advantage of the data and your research to craft the best ads possible.
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