Put simply, buyer personas are representations of your target customers. They are created by collecting and analyzing information about your ideal clients and leads.
Buyer personas can help you:
- Craft custom-made marketing campaigns.
- Personalize your brand messaging.
- Tailor-fit content to best reach your prospective consumers.
In turn, a well-researched and utilized buyer persona will rake in higher sales and increase conversion rates.
Why Should You Use a Buyer Persona?
Once again, a buyer persona is the result of an in-depth study and analysis of your target customers.
If done right, this could provide you with higher marketing ROI and an improved relationship with your clients.
For example, a buyer personas can greatly benefit your content marketing efforts.
Why?
Because you’ve done the research, you know what types of content they want to consume and the topics they find relevant and interesting.
Personas will provide a clearer and more focused direction that helps you customize your content as you’re creating it.
Where Will You Gather Information for a Buyer Persona?
The first and most important step in creating a buyer persona is collecting data.
You simply need to take a close look at your research and identify the key points relevant to your concerns.
Here are some suggestions on where to find this data.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the go-to place to gather relevant demographic information about your website visitors.
This is why it’s always advisable to connect your website to Google Analytics straight away.
Basically, your analytics data would include:
- The keywords visitors used to land on your site.
- The amount of time visitors spent on your site.
- How your visitors found your site (organic search, social, email, etc.).
These pieces of information are crucial when creating your buyer personas. This data helps you better understand the triggers that led visitors to click on your site.
It also sheds light on what keywords people associate with your brand, allowing you to capitalize on them.
2. Market Research
Market research allows you to detect problems and look for solutions alongside your customers.
This generally involves surveys, interviews, or feedback polls.
While these efforts may be time-consuming, the rewards you will reap greatly exceed the sacrifices.
Here are some suggestions on how to conduct market research.
Integrate a Feedback Poll or Surveys on Your Website
The information you can get from your actual customers is priceless. But it doesn’t have to stop there.
Through reaching out using a feedback poll, you can gather responses from passersby on your site as well as from the customers of your competitors.
To do this, you can manually add a feedback poll to your site or you can use tools and Hotjar, which also provides analytics on the behavior of users while browsing your website.
SurveyMonkey is another great feedback tool, which lets you create surveys using your social media accounts.
Your surveys or questionnaires should be short and direct to the point. Try to limit your questions to five or less.
Gathering feedback from your visitors will allow you to better understand why they are on your site and get insights on how to retain them as customers.
Since these answers are from actual site visitors and customers, integrating the information into your buyer persona helps make it more authentic.
Search for Reviews of Your Products or Services
While the data from surveys and feedback polls are undoubtedly priceless, a simple Google search of your business could reveal valuable information as well.
Apart from learning more about what your customers think of your company, you will also be able to identify your weak points, especially in relation to your competitors.
Take a look at sites like Consumer Report, Trust Pilot, and Test Freaks. Depending on the nature of your business, there are definitely review sites available that cater to your products or services.
Usually, product or service reviews provide comparisons among various companies.
While it might not be easy to read about your limitations, these are goldmines when it comes to fresh ideas on how to improve your performance and upgrade your offerings.
Take Advantage of Forums and Other Communities
Spare a few hours to browse forums dedicated to businesses like your and you will discover incredible insights from users.
In these communities, almost everyone has a valuable suggestion to offer – all ripe for the picking for the ingenious marketer.
More importantly, the discussion boards usually identify issues or problems for every product or service, which would cut down your time spent on evaluating your offerings.
Check out platforms like Reddit and Quora to better flesh out your buyer persona.
If you have the time, you can even interact with the members of the community or post on forums to help you gain a deeper understanding of your target market.
3. Social Media
To make your business more credible and accessible, make sure to create social media profiles on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter.
If it’s relevant to your business, you can even make use of YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat to reach out to more people.
Apart from making your company more visible, having social media accounts for your business also allows you to gather data on the online behavior of your customers.
For example, you can track what topics or issues are relevant to your target audience by checking your Twitter analytics. This can be found under the Audience tab in your account.
You can also use tools like Daily 140 and Followerwonk to gain a deeper understanding of your users.
How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?
Now that you have already gathered information for your buyer persona, the next step is to create one.
Here are the basic elements to include on your list.
1. Name
It’s important to give your buyer persona a name to humanize your marketing strategies.
2. Job Title/Career
Describe the job role of your buyer persona.
If possible, include details like company size and the industry where he/she works in.
3. Demographics
This would include details like age, gender, and country/city where your buyer persona is located.
Information on the level of education and household income would come in handy as well.
4. Priorities, Goals, Values
Determine the order of priorities in the life of your buyer persona.
- Does he/she live on a tight budget?
- Does family have an integral role in his/her life?
- What causes does your user value?
- Does he/she support environment-related groups?
- Or does he/she focus his/her energy on advancing at work?
5. Marketing Message & Elevator Pitch
This is where your analysis of your audience comes in.
Based on the data you collected and reviewed, what message would appeal most to your target customers?
Tailor-fit your branding to best catch their attention and motivate them to avail of your products or services.
The Takeaway
Creating a buyer persona will help you understand and connect more with your audience.
By deeply understanding the concerns and motivations of buyers, you will be able to provide better solutions to their problems and present yourself as the ideal option above all others in your industry.
More Content Marketing Resources Here:
- How to Write Customer-Focused Content That Converts
- 10 Things Your Content Must Do to Succeed
- 6 Ways Marketing & Sales Can Work Together
Image Credits
Featured Image: sky_designs/DepositPhotos.com
Screenshots taken by Adam Heitzman, January 2018
