You must place yourself in your customers’ shoes to sell to your audience. You need to figure out their needs, interests, and what motivates their buying decision.
This is only possible when you have detailed buyer personas that specify the characteristics of your ideal customers.
This blog answers the question, “what is a buyer persona?”, the role they play in improving your marketing efforts, and the content marketing tips you can use for success.
What is a buyer persona?
Buyer persona definition: Based on data and research, a detailed description of the people who represent your target audience. This isn’t a real person but a fictional representation of the people who embody your best potential customers’ characteristics. Buyer personas will help you focus your marketing efforts on qualified prospects and align all the work across your organization.
You will give the buyer persona a name, demographic details, behavioral traits, and interests. You will understand their goals, challenges, pain points, and buying patterns. You can even give them a face and create a cardboard cutout of your buyer persona to give them a real presence in your office.
The idea is to think about this model customer like they are a real person. This will allow you to create marketing messages targeted specifically to them. The buyer persona will inform everything from product development to the marketing channels you’ll use and your brand voice.
Since your products may appeal to different groups of people, you may need to create more than one customer persona. It’s impossible to know all your customers or prospects individually, but you can create buyer personas to represent each segment of your customer base. Also, note that you can create negative buyer personas to indicate people you do not want to target with your business, messaging, and ads.
Why are they important?
Buyer personas will help you understand your customers better. The relevant customer information will empower you to target the right people at the right time with the right message.
Your products appeal to certain groups of people, and buyer personas define these customer segments to make your marketing much more targeted. You don’t want to spend your marketing dollars promoting your products to people who have no interest in buying them, and buyer personas prevent this from happening. Buyer personas specify the people you should target, the marketing channels to help you connect with them, and the messages they want to hear.
Buyer personas will also help you understand what your buyers look like and why they would be willing to buy from you. You will know where your ideal customer lives, their age range, and their interests. You will also know their motivations and purchasing habits, allowing you to target different customer groups appropriately.
As a brand, you also need buyer personas to establish your credibility. Customers buy from brands they trust, and taking the time to understand them shows that you care about your customers, which will encourage them to engage further with your company. Customer persona information will empower you to connect with potential customers in a relevant and contextual manner, thus gaining their trust and confidence.
Buyer personas will also help you tailor your messages, products, services, and business to meet your customers’ needs. A keen understanding of your customers’ characteristics will guide you on crafting your marketing messages to connect with your users effectively and design your products to encourage uptake.
What’s required to craft a buyer persona?
This section of the blog guides you on the customer information you need to collect to craft effective buyer personas.
Personal information
Start by collecting relevant personal information about your customers. You should find out your customers’ ideal age, where they stay, their marital status, and income levels. If you run an online business, your ideal customer probably doesn’t have a car, so home deliveries are important to them. In this case, you can list not owning a car as a personal trait when designing your buyer personas.
Defining your ideal customer’s age will help you know your customer’s preferred communication channels and marketing content. For example, visuals that convey the intended message quickly appeal to the younger demographic than long-form articles that explain a concept in greater detail.
Understanding your consumers’ income level will help you understand how much disposable income they have to buy your products.
Professional details
You should also understand your ideal customers’ professional details to make your marketing campaigns a success. Find out the highest level of education your buyer has achieved and the type of companies they work for. You should also identify their role in the company and how they define success as the workplace.
Goals and challenges
What are the personal goals and challenges of your target audience? An HR professional leading a team of 15 people at a recruitment firm may aim to find the best candidates for their clients and earn a high salary to send her children to private school. She challenges standing out from other recruitment firms and retaining staff.
When you know your customers’ goals, you can tell them how your products will help them achieve their goals and move forward in their professional and personal life. Understanding their challenges will also help you clarify how your offering solves their problems and makes life easier for them.
Where they are
What technology does your target audience use? Do they use smartphones over laptops? Do they prefer email to phone calls? Do they use social media to stay current on trends?
Understanding how your customers interact with technology will refine your sales and marketing processes by letting you know the best methods of reaching them. If your customers spend most of their time online consuming short video content, TikTok is the best platform for connecting with them. If your target customers are mid-level managers who are always consuming opinion pieces and industry news, then you need an active profile on LinkedIn.
Values and fears
Take the time to understand the values and fears of your customers. The HR professional we have mentioned earlier in the text values career progression and decent pay for honest work. Her biggest fears are getting fired because her company isn’t profitable and losing her best recruitment advisors to a competition.
Such clear definitions of values and fears narrow your scope and help you understand what makes your customers who they are. Use this information to enhance your messaging and make more people excited to interact with your company.
How to create buyer personas
With all the relevant information about your customers, you’re now ready to form the buyer personas that will be at the heart of your growth marketing strategies. These are the steps that are involved in this process.
Add your personas’ basic demographic information
Use surveys, phone interviews, and in-person talks to get demographic-based information from your prospects. Use descriptive keywords and your customers’ unique mannerisms to make it easy for your marketing team to identify certain personas when they are talking to prospects.
Discover your persona’s goals
This is where you share what you’ve learned about your customers’ goals from the interviews. From your talks, you will know what keeps your prospects up at night and their personal and professional motivations.
It’s at this stage also where you will discover your persona’s challenges. List them out and tie everything together by telling people how your company will help them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges.
Train your team to respond to your personas’ common challenges
Add real quotes from the interviews that show what your personas want, who they are, and what they are concerned about. Next, create a list of objections that may cause your personas not to buy your products. Give this information to your sales team to prepare them for conversations with your personas. They’ll now be in a better position to respond to your personas’ common challenges and persuade them to buy your products.
Create detailed messaging for each persona
The next step is to craft the right messaging for each persona. Use the language your personas use to ensure the message resonates with more people. Your messaging should convey the benefits your personas stand to gain from using your product.
If you have different personas, you will need a different message for each customer group. Don’t use the same message since the different personas have different characteristics, and what appeals to one group may not appeal to the other.
The complete content guide
Content marketing makes the world a more engaging place, and without it, you’re risking incredible engagement and conversion opportunities. Get all of the knowledge you need with our insider resources that’ll tell you how to make the most out of your content production – Content Marketing Made Easy: Your Complete Handbook.
We have explained what is a buyer persona and the role they play in any marketing strategy. A buyer persona can be a difficult thing to create, and that’s why you should work with a growth marketing agency to craft targeted personas for your marketing campaigns.
The team at Growth Marketing Genie can help. We are experts at developing buyer personas for your marketing program and content marketing activities. Through these personas, you will create personalized content for your audience and generate high-quality leads.
Are you struggling to attract better quality leads? Let us help you create a better marketing strategy.
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