It’s all in the detailing…
“Catching someone’s attention and being heard amid this streaming torrent of information is the greatest challenge of contemporary marketing.”
― Adele Revella,
Marketing Monica, IT Ian, Sales Simon, Mommy Megan, Accountant Ann…
Do you know who your buyer persona is?
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.
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Well, What is a Buyer Persona?
If you are reading this, we assume that you’ve heard about buyer personas – briefly, at the least. You may wonder what it is that makes it so important for an organisation or product’s marketing strategy. Let’s break it down in simple terms to help you understand better.
A buyer persona is a detailed representation of a semi-fictional character of who your ideal customers would be.
Let’s say you wish to market your product, developed specifically for babies. Who would you target your marketing communication towards? What will the tone of your messaging be? What sort of design will you zero in on? These are questions that easily get answered if you have a comprehensive buyer persona developed.
Why Build a Buyer Persona?
Simply put, buyer personas help you understand your customers and navigate the landscape of your most probable buyers. Going back to our earlier example, your baby product is definitely not going to be targeted towards a Marketing Monica or an Accountant Ann. Who do you think would most likely buy a baby product? Mommie Megan, you guess?!
Therefore, you will need to know who this Mommie Megan is, what her hobbies are, what a typical day of her life looks like, where she generally buys stuff she needs for her baby, what her buying preferences are, etc. Many more such insights go into defining her persona.
It is this information that will help you develop an effective marketing strategy supported by compelling content.
Building a Strong Buyer Persona
There is no hard and fast rule to creating a buyer persona. There are plenty of templates available online that you could use to build an effective persona for your marketing campaigns. Let’s go through some simple steps to create a strong buyer persona.
Put your research glasses on
Creating a buyer persona involves identifying and defining a personality to your potential buyer. It is important that you deeply understand your customers and what need they expect you to fulfill with your service or product. This is where your research glasses will come in handy. Some of the most obvious details that you will need to collect are:
- Demographics: Demographics answers questions related to your customers’ location, age, and industry they work in.
- Career: What do your customers do as part of their careers? What are their major responsibilities?
- Lifestyle: What kind of lifestyle do your customers lead? What are the activities they indulge in? Where do they prefer going during weekends?
- Media Preference: Where do your customers get their information from? What are the social media platforms they prefer and spend most of their time on?
- Brands: What are some brands that your customers already use? What are the features of those brands your customers like and dislike?
- Challenges/Problems: What are the problems or challenges that the customers face and need help solving?
Where do you collect all this data from? The simplest way to collect data on your target audience is by doing a thorough primary research. Face-to-face interviews, focus group study or online surveys help collect raw data that can be used to draw patterns and understand your target audience better. Survey Monkey is among the most used online survey tools that lets you design questions as per your needs to ensure you get the accurate responses to the survey.
Check your site analytics to find out valuable patterns in your target audience’s online behaviour. Your site analytics can tell a lot about your site visitors’ demographics, the keywords they used, and the time they spent on your website. All this data can be a gold mine that can be used to create buyer personas that will bring the results that you desire.
Populate a buyer persona template
Now that you have all the raw data in hand, you will start seeing patterns among the potential buyers in your target market. You will now need to segregate these buyers into different segments and create buyer personas. Every buyer persona should ideally have a unique name and a photo attached to it, to make it look and feel like an authentic person. Here’s a summary of what you should include in your buyer persona template:
- Name
- Job title and description
- Demographics: location, age, gender, family size, income details, etc,.
- Goals and challenges: How do you plan to help the buyer reach his goals, and what resolution do you have for the buyers challenges
- Buyer’s personal values and opinions
Here is an example of a buyer’s persona
There are plenty of free downloadable buyer persona templates available online. You can go through and use whichever suits your needs. Your marketing message is hugely influenced by the persona you create. The key messaging, tone, timing, medium all of this is decided based on the data you put into the buyer persona template.
By following the steps outlined above, you can easily create compelling personas that can aid in developing winning marketing strategies and get your business some valuable leads.
Remember, if you ain’t giving enough attention to the minute details, your marketing strategy may well fizzle out without effect. It’s time you focus on subtleties!