If you are a brand looking for ways to target your marketing efforts, the term buyer persona is something you need to understand. Buyer personas help you focus your marketing and realize your customers’ needs. But ultimately, it’s about doing a better job for your target audience.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas, or customer personas, are fictional illustrations of your ideal customer. They’re primarily made-up characters representing the clients you’d like to target. Buyer personas created using market research and other data on the audience you wish to attract may assist you in defining the distinct demands of your customers.
What are the benefits of using buyer personas?
There are a lot of benefits to using buyer personas, and many companies use them to make better marketing and sales decisions. One of the first benefits is that you can target your marketing and sales efforts more effectively. For example, you can use buyer personas to determine which types of advertisements are more likely to be effective with your target consumers. Another benefit of buyer personas is that you can learn more about your customers’ needs and preferences before they actually purchase your product or service. This helps you create a better experience for them when they do buy, so they will be more likely to return to you for more products in the future.
There are also other benefits to using buyer personas, including the fact that they can help you develop more effective customer service policies. You can learn more about your customers’ issues, expectations, and concerns so that you are better prepared to provide them with solutions. Additionally, this will help improve customer relations and relationship development so that there are fewer problems in the future.
Tips For Creating Buyer Personas
While nailing down buyer personas can seem challenging, it really is just a matter of having a process. Consider these five tips that will help get you there when you create a buyer persona:
1. Do Your Homework
The first thing you should do when establishing your buyer personas is learn everything you can about your target customer. In other words, do your research. You can use analytics taken from previous marketing campaigns, customer surveys, and competitor research to better develop your ideal personas.
2. Set Objectives for your marketing campaigns
When creating your buyer personas, you should consider the goals of your marketing campaigns. What are you trying to accomplish? For example, if you’re selling clothing online, the objective might be to increase sales or lead generation. Or if you’re selling construction materials, it could be that you’re looking to gain more exposure for your company. Once you have set your objectives, it will become easier for you to drill down and define the different types of customer in your persona. This will help ensure that these customers are targeted effectively and that their needs are met with ease.
3. Identify the demographic information
Once you have made research on your target customers, fill in all of their demographic information, such as age, gender, location, and income. These will allow you to formulate an accurate marketing strategy and help your sales team when formulating your marketing messages.
4. Understand Customer Goals
What problem is your customer looking to fix by buying from you? Depending on the sort of products or services you provide, these objectives or motives may be tied to their professional or personal lives. Pinpointing these goals can help you better understand why someone uses your services.
5. Get Organized
Now, organize the information and look for common themes or differences. One business can have more than one buyer persona. A virtual company may sell both retail and wholesale, for example; and some businesses work with clients from a wide range of sectors. If you sell a range of items, each of which corresponds to a distinct industry, committing one customer persona to each market your service may make sense.
6. Build a User Research Database with your Existing Customers
If you don’t have any customers yet, start with your existing customers base. Ask your current customers to participate in a user research survey that asks questions about their demographics, current and past experiences with your business, and what they would like to see from you in the future. Next, organize this information into a database that includes both qualitative and quantitative information. The goal of these surveys is to identify the different types of customers for whom you would want to create buyer personas.
7. Write Some Fiction
Creating buyer personas is really about developing a story around crucial characters, which are your buyers. The persona is an in-depth description of their personality, lifestyle, needs, and motives.
Begin by naming your buyer persona. The purpose of creating buyer personas in the first place is to help you promote and sell more personally. Giving your buyer personas names personalizes the experience. Once you’ve decided on a name, begin documenting all you learn during your investigation.
Initially, you want to think about demographics. For example, how old is your character? What is their health status? What about finances? Are they middle-income?
Next, consider what is important to them. For instance, are they parents? How about decision-makers?
8. Craft a message for your buyer persona
Work alongside with your sales and marketing teams to develop a message that drags the attention of your audience persona. Make use of your channels and resources available and identify where is are your audience personas mostly present. Is it in Facebook? Instagram? LinkedIn? Do an audience research to find out and adapt your message to the different platforms to make it attractive.
9. Tailor Your Marketing to Reach the Personas
Developing in-depth buyer personas helps brands and marketers better understand the customer’s pain points better and create solutions.
Buyer personas enable you to communicate with current and prospective consumers and meet their difficulties and ambitions. When done correctly, your company may use them to establish a relationship with genuine consumers, encouraging trust and brand loyalty.
Building an effective buyer persona can be difficult if you have never done it before. At REALTOP we take the time to help you define your target market and create marketing campaigns that will drive the best results! Contact us today and get a free marketing plan!
Nik Tsoukales, founder of REALTOP, is an experienced digital marketer with a track record of growing businesses and sales teams. He has received multiple awards for leading fast-growing companies and specializes in organic SEO, Google PPC, and Social Media. With over 89k clients acquired online, Nik’s expertise spans various industries including finance, healthcare, and real estate.