You may have overheard the term being mentioned as part of your job, or even when reading a marketing article or two, but you might not have fully understood what the phrase is referring to.
In this blog post, we will explore what it means to create a buyer persona, and how beneficial the process is for your business, rather than just understanding your target markets.
So, what exactly is a buyer persona?
Well, the simple definition from Google suggests:
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals.
And did you know, according to SEMrush, a persona-based marketing strategy can result in 100% increase in page views per visit, a 900% increase in site visit duration and a 171% spike in ROI?
And that’s the power of a buyer persona.
So, how do I start the process of creating a buyer persona?
Before you try and sell a product, or even make a product or service, it’s vital that you research the marketplace and your potential buyers.
After some research and experience, you will start to notice trends in the market, and pick up on the type of person who is purchasing from you, or utilising your service.
Typically the target market will be described with statistical factors such as:
Sex | Age | Post Code/s | Social Grade | Social Status | Occupation | Income
The above information is very helpful when increasing your marketing efforts, but the information is only surface level; it doesn’t really provide details of how we can really connect with them.
As marketers, we need to understand what our ideal customers are concerned about or interested in and what makes them tick. Without this information we can’t create any of the following effectively:
- Design of marketing material
- Images
- Messages
- Content for website, article and emails.
- Call to actions
This is a great free tool to create your very own Buyer Persona?
Ok, so what information do we need to know about our potential customers or ‘Buyer Personas’?
Here is an example Buyer Persona that may help…
You may think that knowing an individual’s hobbies may not be relevant to you if you’re an accountant, for example.
However, think about the amount of golf or wine tasting events you get invited to as part of your networking efforts? These are all key aspects of your buyer persona, to ensure you approach them in the best way.
Depending on your business, you can change the information so that it’s most relevant to you.
For example, if you’re selling stationery to an office manager it probably won’t matter too much whether they’re married or not.
However, it will be important to know what job pressures they have.
Once you know what your buyer persona’s are trying to accomplish, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions then you will then be ready to create the marketing material that will really resonate.
Once you know what content will work, you now need to understand where best to publish it. Where does your target buyer persona hang out online? Where do they proactively search for your kind of content?
Attention is the first step of Marketing, simply research the various social media platforms to understand which is most appropriate for your audience.
Google will typically be the first place for those proactively searching for content like yours, but research this using Google Adword’s Keyword Planner for the most relevant search queries. Typically it takes months for your content to be ranked on the first page, which means you may have to look at how you can be mentioned on the web pages currently ranking. Always research those highly ranked pages and investigate ways to reach out to the website owners and get involved in their content.
After spending some time researching your current customer base or potential buyers, then you can start to answer all the above questions.
Once you have the answers, you can then move on to create a number of buyer personas for each product or service you sell.
Now you have created your Buyer Personas, you will find it much easier to generate the marketing material and campaigns that will really resonate with your target consumer, and ensure a more effective approach.
If you’d like to find out how we can help your business create a successful digital marketing strategy and buyer personas, please click here for a free video recorded review of your online presence.
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