Buyer personas are an essential part of marketing your business. They allow you to enhance your relationship with your target audience, further hone your brand identity, and improve your marketing efforts. If your marketing strategy lacks buyer personas or if they need an update, read on to learn more about buyer personas as well as how to create them for your business.
Why You Need Buyer Personas
It is essential to have buyer personas for your business because they are the key to resonating with your target audience and marketing yourself to your customers. Rather than just catering to their demographic information, you can appeal to what is important to them and to what makes them unique—which is what will help you to express what makes your business unique.
When you can hone in on a specific personality, perspective, or set of circumstances, you can attract exactly the right customers for your business while distinguishing it from your competitors.
Buyer personas are important for your marketing efforts because they allow you to converse with your audience, rather than talk at or talk to them. You can use their values, pain points, problems, preferences, and desires to foster a deeper and more meaningful connection with them.
What Constitutes a Buyer Persona?
There are many bits and pieces of information that make up a buyer persona, and the most important information for forming one will vary from company to company. Here are some examples of traits and characteristics that businesses use to create their buyer personas:
• Home life
Where do they live?
Are they single, married, or divorced?
Do they have children? If so, how many and how old?, how old are their kids, do they have pets
Do they have pets?
• Work life
Where do they work?
What’s their position?
What’s their education?
What issues might they be experiencing at work?
What are their career goals and challenges?
What is their day-to-day schedule like?
How do they commute to work?
• Personal life
What are their passions, hobbies, and fears?
How do they identify/define themselves?
What’s important to them? What causes do they care about?
• Consumer life
Do they use coupons?
Do they pay with cash or card?
Do they perform online research, do they shop online?
Do they support local businesses?
• Communication preferences
How do they best receive information – watching, doing, hearing?
What is their preferred method of communication- email, phone, text, social media, in person?
What language do they use on social media, in emails, in person?
• Their relationship to your business
What stage of the funnel are they in? Awareness, interest, purchase, loyalty?
How did they find your business?
Do they know what other businesses offer similar products and services?
These are just many of the questions you can ask to identify and create buyer personas for your business.
How to Create a Buyer Persona
To create a buyer persona for your business, you’ll need to figure out not only the attributes mentioned above, but also which attributes they share. What do they all have in common? The more overlapping details you can uncover in terms of demographics, lifestyle, behaviors, and preferences, the more specific your buyer personas will be, as well as the more effective your marketing efforts. Here are some ways to collect data to create your buyer persona.
Market Research
Buyer personas are frequently developed by doing market research within your industry—especially if you’re a new business. Check out social media channels and groups to see what kinds of patterns you can gather or what stands out. Also, take a look at what your competitors are doing and who they targeting—this is one way to benefit from your competition. Sometimes it’s easier to identify information about your own business when comparing it to another. You may even want to obtain some industry reports to get a sense of what others are investing their resources in, and maybe even what your customers may be skeptical about.
Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are generally the foundation of every buyer persona. Interacting directly with the people who have already purchased your product or service will help you discover what they like, or don’t like, about it. Interviews are also a great way to connect with your customers on a more personal level and gather even more information for your buyer personas.
Customer Polls and Surveys
While interviews are great for gathering more of the emotional components of your customers’ behavior, polls and surveys are great for collecting more quantifiable data.
Whether you use an online survey, social media poll, or even follow-up emails after a purchase, you can learn more about your customers’ buying habits.
Customer Data
Check out your records to learn more about your customers and create buyer personas out of them. Take a look at:
• How they found out about your business,
• What they buy
• How much they spend
• How often they make a purchase, and
• Which channels they use to communicate with or follow your business
Keywords
Another option when creating buyer personas is to take a look at the keywords your website visitors are using to find your site. The terms and language they use could provide some helpful insight into their personalities, problems, and preferences.
Lead Generation Campaigns
One last tool for creating your buyer persona is your lead generation campaigns. People who are interested in a company’s product or service are often happy to take advantage of a free eBook or webinar in exchange for providing some information about themselves. You may want to ask for their age, location, interests, and purchasing goals in addition to their email address or phone number. However, too many form fields can cause a person to disengage, so you may need to test out a few different scenarios first.
Fine-tuning out your company’s buyer personas offers many benefits to your marketing and business growth. The more you see the recipients of your marketing campaigns as individuals, rather than a target audience, the more effective you can be in conecting with them and attracting them to your business.
