You know your business’s products and services inside and out. But how well do you know your audience? As a business owner or marketer, you probably have an understanding of your customer/client/member basic demographic data, but to target them effectively, you have to dig deeper. That’s where buyer personas come in.
What Are Buyer Personas and Why Are They Important?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on customer insights and market research. Developing personas helps businesses understand and relate to their target audience and sets the tone for all content creation and marketing material. By analyzing trends, behaviors, similarities, and patterns among your target audience, you can create a marketing strategy built around their objectives, day-to-day challenges, and pain points.
How To Create Buyer Personas
Finding out what makes a person act is no small task. Where do you start? What questions do you ask? Let’s talk about some essential steps to building a detailed buyer persona.
Do Thorough Audience Research
To create buyer personas, you need to gain a deep understanding of your customers, prospects, potential new members, and anyone else who might fit within your target audience. This can be done through research, surveys, and interviews. Below are some questions to consider asking:
- What is your marital status?
- What is your household income level?
- What is your gender?
- What is your age?
- What is your job title?
- How do you like to be contacted by businesses?
- What does a typical day look like for you?
- What type of industry do you work in?
- What are some of the biggest challenges you face?
- Why did you consider your last purchase?
- How do you search for product information?
- What need(s) to do you have that aren’t being addresses?
To gather this information, talk to your sales team and existing customers, use your analytics platforms and customer database to get information on people already interacting with your digital channels and website. You can expand your audience research by conducting questionnaires and surveys, and investing in focus groups, and one-on-one interviews.
Define Each Unique Persona
Once you’ve collected your data, it’s time to organize it. As you analyze your research, look for common characteristics that can be grouped to form unique personas. You will likely have multiple personas, so start by giving each one a memorable name to make them easier for your team to remember and identify with. For example, persona #1 could be named Evan, the Entry-Level Employee, and persona #2 could be named Diane, the Working Executive Head of Household, and so on.
Define your personas based on:
- Demographics
- Education
- Career and working life
- Daily life
- Consumer habits
- Pain points, goals, challenges
- Finances
- Personality and personal life
- Online behavior
- Product preferences
Once you’ve segmented your personas, summarize each one’s biggest challenges and pain points. Explain their potential objections and overall goals. What’s holding them back from success? What barriers do they face in reaching their goal? Then, summarize how your business can help or serve each type of customer.
Create Persona-Focused Messaging
For each buyer persona, create marketing messages that demonstrates how you can help that customer. Center your marketing communications around this message and remember to speak directly to “Evan”, or “Diane”, and your other personas.
Then, it’s time to meet with your team to tell them how to talk about your products and services. This will help ensure everyone in your company is on the same page and speaking the same language when talking with leads and customers.
If you’re creating content for multiple personas, label each piece of content to clarify your targeting. That way, you can monitor how often you reach out to each audience segment. By keeping of track of this, you can compare results from each personas content to identify the most valuable customers for your business.
Keep in Mind
Who your customers are, what motivates them and why they buy are critical to running a successful marketing campaign. While buyer personas do require time, tools, and teamwork, once you do the work, you’ll be able to connect with consumers on a personal level and develop deep connections with your customers.
If you need help creating personas for your business, PMD Group can help! Contact us for more information or to get started.