Last Tuesday, we talked about the importance of defining your target audience and how to define it. During our journey, we mentioned that creating a Buyer Persona to represent your target audience can help create more personalized and targeted messaging that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and interests.
Today, we will talk about the Buyer Persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Our friends at Semrush define a Buyer Persona as an abstract depiction of the ideal customer founded upon both qualitative and quantitative data from market/competitor research and existing customer profiles. The objective behind creating a buyer persona is to understand your audience better. It is easier to tailor your marketing, product development, and content creation if you have a clear vision of who you are addressing
Why are Buyer Personas Important?
Let’s run with an example: imagine you have to knit a blanket. You do not know the person this person, nor did this person give you any instructions other than the fact that you should make a blanket. You pick a material and a color and start creating, hoping for the best. You deliver the blanket. They hate it.
Sometime after, a family member asks for a blanket. You have known this person for a long time, and you know they love Perry the Platypus. You get to work and create a blanket full of tiny baby Perrys and deliver it. They love it.
What is the difference between those two scenarios? On the second one, you knew the person. You had a better understanding of what they like and what things they will accept. You knew exactly who you were working for.
Buyer personas are essential for successful marketing and sales strategies as they allow you to define who you are working for. Having a well defined Buyer Persona can help with:
- Personalization: understanding your target audience allows you to create more personalized messaging that speaks directly to their pain points, interests, and motivations.
- Better targeting: a clear understanding of who your customer is can help target your outreach more effectively.
- Improved customer experience: your customer’s needs and preferences are the base to create a better customer experience. From tailoring your product or service offerings to customer service and your website’s user experience, knowing who you are addressing and their needs helps you better serve your target audience.
- Cost-saving: trying to target everyone all the time is a waste of resources as not everyone will convert. To achieve a healthy Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), you should ensure you are putting your dollars where conversions are more likely to happen.
The Key To Creating a Buyer Persona
Now, for the million-dollar question: how do I create a Buyer Persona? The steps are similar to the ones you take to define your audience: you start by identifying who you want to reach with your marketing efforts and gather data. Once you have data on your target audience, you should analyze it to identify commonalities and trends among your audience. Look for patterns in demographics, interests, and behaviors. Based on your analysis, create a fictional persona to represent your ideal customer.
Give your persona a name, a photo, and a backstory. Make sure to include information such as their age, gender, occupation, hobbies, pain points, and motivations to make your persona more real. The idea of the Buyer Persona is to have a very visual representation of your audience.
Now That I Have a Persona, What Shall I do With it?
Now that you have created your Buyer Persona use it to guide your marketing efforts: create content and messaging that speaks directly to your persona’s needs and interests. Use your Persona to target your advertising, social media, and email marketing campaigns.
At times, you might need to redefine your Persona. As the market evolves and audiences change, testing your Persona against real-world data can help you look for areas where your Persona may be inaccurate or incomplete. Revising your strategy and your Persona accordingly will improve your results.
What name would you give to your Persona? Let us know in the comment section below!
