What is a Buyer Persona?
To create an accurate profile of your Average Customer/Buyer after extensive research and information gathering is known as creating a Buyer Persona.
All successful business have their audience clearly segmented, they know the do’s and don’ts on how and where to Target the segmented groups.
Segmentation can consist of many groups which have common traits, however, each group is not exactly the same.
With the help of a buyer persona, it is possible to compile the common traits between these groups and come up with a detailed representation of your Target Audience.
To sum up, the buyer persona brings your segmentation to life!
Negative Personas
The customers that you would like to avoid, these are the ones that are unlikely to purchase your product or service.
You can create a persona for them as well, this is called a negative persona.
This will tell you about their characteristics and behaviour, which will help you adapt your marketing strategy to not target such groups.
Why create Buyer Personas?
Most of all, to create a filtered approach to marketing and sales.
When you create a buyer persona, you have defined what is your Target Audience.
You can reach them better as you will be more familiar with the channels they are using, which means you can now tailor and target your content creation and marketing strategies accordingly.
Creating a Buyer Persona
Internal Research
Creating a Buyer Persona should start with internal research if you have existing clients.
Start with looking through your database to discover patterns of customer behaviour, how they are taking your content, what are the common elements among the customers, look at both repeated and one time customers.
Tips
You can create forms on your website to collect important information about personas.
You should also take feedback from Sales and customer service departments on their interactions with the customers to see what generalizations they can come up with for your frequent customer group.
Interviews and Surveys
The number of people can vary, but start with at least 10, this can be a time-consuming task and often hard to accomplish as not many people like to do interviews.
However, if you can do this correctly, it can give you a lot of insight!
While creating the interview with customers and prospects, make sure the questions and categories are very clear and easily understandable.
Interviews can be done in person or over the phone.
Like interviews, surveys can be a challenging task.
But having a well-structured survey which asks the right questions can be very helpful in creating accurate personas.
Tip
Learn more about How to create and structure the ideal questions for capturing information regarding personas.
Using a Buyer Persona
Share the Information
Once you have a finished article in terms of an accurate Buyer Persona, this should be common knowledge within your work teams.
Especially the ones in charge of creating content and interacting with customers directly or indirectly.
Tailored Content
Create content that would appeal to your buyer persona, integrate things you can use to motivate the target audience to choose you over other brands.
Make them feel like your product or service was the one they were “looking for” and it’s the “perfect match”.
Basically, your content should align with the findings of your buyer persona process.
Targeted Marketing
This is the “money shot”, once you have tailored content, you need to do targeted marketing.
Focus on the channels where your customers spend their time, is it Facebook, Instagram, do they listen to the radio, TV advertising, etc.
Act according to their preference, to prioritize your marketing efforts for those particular channels.
