While working on your company’s marketing strategy, you may have heard the term “buyer persona”. A well-defined, accurate buyer persona lays the foundation for a successful digital marketing campaign. But what exactly is a buyer persona?
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s a profile that gives you detailed information about the customers to whom you should market your products and services. These customers are your target audience.
Buyer personas are created using market research and data about existing customers, including demographic, psychographic and behavioral audience segmentation. Your business can have more than one buyer persona because different people can be involved in the purchasing process.
Knowing your audience is absolutely essential to the success of any marketing strategy. With this knowledge, you can tailor your marketing efforts in order to increase customer acquisition, satisfaction and retention. Clearly defined buyer personas can also help you improve your products and services to better fit your customers’ needs and meet their expectations.
Know Your Audience
Actionable buyer personas go beyond profiling ideal customers to reveal insights about their motivations and behavior.
They help companies identify key characteristics of their ideal customers, such as:
- Customers’ personal and professional goals
- What they’re concerned about
- Their pain points (challenges and problems)
- The solutions they seek
- How they search for these solutions
- Their buying behavior and decision-making criteria
- Attitudes and beliefs that affect their purchasing decisions
There’s no simple guide to building a buyer persona for your business. Every company, every marketing agency has its own way of approaching this process. Below are examples of some of the characteristics you may include in your buyer persona profiles.
- Name
- Age
- Marital Status
- Children?
- Educational Level
- Job Title
- Income Level
- Company Type
- Company Size
- Job Responsibilities
- Required Skills
- Personality Traits
- Personal Goals
- Organizational Goals
- Typical Day at Work
- Social Behavior
- Role in Purchasing Process
- Challenges/Pain Points
- Solutions Research Method
- Content/Topic Preferences
- Time Spent Consuming Content
- Contact Preferences
- Buying Decision Criteria
- Drivers and Motivators
- KPI/Success Metrics
The Importance of Buyer Personas
In today’s digital marketing landscape, creating buyer personas offers multiple benefits, including more effective marketing campaigns and stronger connections with potential customers.
When you know your target audience’s pain points, objectives and buying behavior, you can design and market products and services that are relevant and attractive to them. You can also provide better customer service and increase customer loyalty.
Following are some of the advantages of using buyer personas to guide your digital marketing strategies:
1. A Well-Defined Target Audience
Well-defined buyer personas provide insights about where these customers are, what they’re talking about, what they’re looking for, etc. These insights allow you to design content and tactics that are strategically positioned to reach and engage the customers that are most likely to be interested in your products and services.
2. Deeper Connections With Customers
Another way that buyer personas help companies is by keeping their focus on what the customers need rather than what the companies do. A customer-centric approach shows genuine concern for customers’ pain points and cultivates trust and credibility with them.
3. Valuable Insights About Customers
By providing answers to questions such as the ones below, buyer personas describe behavioral patterns and purchase drivers that companies can use to fine-tune their marketing efforts and make them more effective.
- When, where and how can you reach your potential customers?
- What do they need? What are their pain points?
- What are the solutions they need and seek?
- Why do/should they choose you over your competitors?
- What can drive your customers away?
- What can bring them back?
- What do they prioritize when making purchasing decisions?
- lowest price?
- greater value?
- product quality?
- reliable customer service?
- innovative product features?
- alignment with company values?
4. Tailored Content
As you get to know your buyer personas, you discover what type of content is more likely to reach and engage them. Do your buyers use social media to learn about brands and trends? Do they prefer short informative blog posts or long, educational ones? Do they respond to a voice/tone that is casual, professional, amusing, intellectual? Would they prefer information delivered by video, infographics, podcasts, emails?
5. Save Time and Money
Digital marketing is targeted marketing. Its purpose is to reach the right audience in the right place at the right time. This audience comprises customers who are interested in your product/service and who are likely to act on your marketing message. Non-targeted campaigns that are directed at broad audiences typically waste a lot of time and money marketing to the wrong audience.
How to Use Your Buyer Persona
In a nutshell: All of your digital marketing efforts should be directed at solving your buyer personas’ problems–from your social media posts to pay-per-click (PPC) and Google ads campaigns, to blog posts and email marketing.
Are you ready to meet your buyer personas? For more information about how to define your buyer personas and use them to build successful marketing strategies, drop us a line or give us a call.
