How to Develop a Buyer Persona
Have you ever created a marketing strategy and been so confident that it would blow your business’s engagement up, but the only people who seem to be reached are your family, friends or maybe even people that don’t seem interested in your services or product?
Yeah, we have all been there! However, there is a better way!
No matter how big your marketing budget is, or how much effort you put out there to attract your target customer, your strategy will never work without incorporating one essential concept.
This concept is known as the Buyer Persona. Without this practice, you will have a hard time resonating with potential customers. This is because your marketing goals and messages will be left undefined and unaligned with those you want to reach.
The Buyer Persona will help you refine your marketing efforts for the better by giving you a resource to become better equipped at creating targeted content. This means you can be expected to see higher engagement rates and ROI on your marketing strategies.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your target customer. Based on data and research, the persona will embody all the characteristics of your potential customer. You will be required to give the persona a name, create details around its demographics and state their behavioural traits and interests.
You may be wondering, “How will this even help my marketing strategy?”. Well, the only way you can anticipate your target customer’s needs is by understanding who they are. If you are solely putting out campaigns without keeping your customers in mind, there is a small chance your marketing efforts will be successful.
Therefore, you need to get deep into their everyday lives and understand significant details about them, such as their challenges, hobbies, pain point, etc. By truly taking the time to know them, you will have better abilities to convey your message in a way that will resonate. Which will make you better equipped to derive an effective solution for your marketing efforts.
How to Develop Buyer Personas
As you can tell, Buyer Personas are key to a marketing strategy. If you are ready to take your marketing to the next level, the following is a tried and tested outline on how you can create a detailed and effective buyer’s persona.
1. Target Customer Research
Don’t worry – not every step in creating a buyer persona is boring like researching. However, it is a very important step. To truly understand your customers, you’ll need to perform detailed and thorough research. You must be able to back up your description with proof that your customers are the way you depict them to be.
Make sure to mix in both personal and work-related questions. This can be anything from figuring out what they do in their free time to the level of education they have. Also, if you are planning on having a digital marketing strategy using social media, it would be ideal to know their online habits.
2. Segment Your Customers
Many businesses create different personas as their offerings could potentially resonate with various people. For example, a women’s clothing store may have a variety of products that are well-liked by women ages 18-50. You can already see the trouble here as marketing messages for this range could be quite different. Therefore, you’ll need to segment your customers as best as you can to categorize them. This way, each category can be assigned a Buyer’s persona that will best resonate with them.
3. Analyze Your Findings
Before you put your research together to form a buyer persona, you need to understand how your business’s products or services help your target market. In other words, how does your business align with who they are and, how can it make their lives better?
The buyer persona will help you think in terms of the benefits you will offer to your customers. This will ultimately help you focus your business offerings and messages outwards to your customer’s needs and wants.
4. Create The Buyer Persona
Now it is time to use the research and analysis to design your customer’s buyer persona. You want to make your description as realistic and detailed as possible. Your persona will need a name, a city to live in, a job, hobbies, relationships amongst other characteristics that will help paint the story. However, keep in mind that your persona shouldn’t just be a list of characteristics. It needs to depict your real customers accurately and give you insights on how to connect with them!
How Do I Use a Buyer Persona?
A Buyer Persona should be used to influence the wording you use in your marketing, such as on your website, social media posts, and flyers. Your target audience may speak a certain language, or use a certain level of formality in their speak and have their own slang.
It’s important to be aware of how your target audience communicates and likes to be communicated with, and the buyer persona will help you determine this.
A buyer persona can also be used to influence the medium with which you communicate with your audience. Do they spend their time on Facebook, Instagram, or maybe offline? The more information you add to your buyer persona, the more accurately you can assess where your audience spends the most time—and therefore how you should communicate with them.
If you’ve determined that your audience spends their time on Instagram, for example, a buyer persona should also influence the hashtags you use. Are there hashtags specific to your target audience that are regularly used, or can you create one?
Need More Help?
We hope this quick guide gave you some pointers to set you off on the right track of creating a buyer persona and determining who your ideal client is. Need more help creating or utilizing your buyer persona? Contact us today!
