Hello Friends!
Today, personalization is the key to marketing. According to research, 2/3 of millennials expect marketing to be personalized to them and will unfollow a brand if they feel it lacks authenticity. So, how do we create messaging that doesn’t feel packaged, but rather personalized to who our customers are and what they want?
One way to do that is to create a buyer persona.
A Guide to Buyer Personas
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of who your customer is. The intelligent understanding of your customer base is essential for creating effective marketing, sales, and branding plans. Without an accurate understanding of your buyer’s demographic info, how they buy products, and common pain points, it is impossible to develop the right product with the right messaging.
Once we have an understanding of who our buyer is and what they want, we can create content that adds value, develop products, and create a sales funnel that will lead to conversions.
How it Works
How do you create a buyer persona that accurately captures your idealized customer?
It all comes down to research. The easiest pool of data is your current customers. Can you identify any patterns in your customer base? Are they based in one region or one type of region? Are they of a certain age group? Do men prefer your product to women?
By asking these questions, we can begin to create a fictionalized persona that includes the gender, location, income level, education, family situation, and hobbies and interests of our customers.
Another tool that we can use is Facebook Audience Insights. This is a very powerful and underutilized pool of extremely helpful data. By using this tool and others like it, we can see who our customers are, the pages they like, where they tend to live and work, and what they like to do. We can even see who is liking our competitors’ page and the things they like as well.
The other thing that we want to do is gather real-time analysis from your customer base. Reach out to your customers about their experience, and even reach out to those who decided not to become customers and find out why. That way you can include real quotes and common obstacles in your buyer persona.
We also want to understand what your customers’ goals are. These can be related to your product, but also don’t have to be. Understanding the goals and aspirations of your customers is a great way to add depth to your persona and is essential for creating effective and personalized marketing. Remember, great brands are the solution to someones’ problem.
After we have gathered all of the relevant information the last step is to create a name for our buyer persona. If your product is a hiking equipment company, you may want to name your persona Hiker John. Then you can list his relevant demographic information.
He lives in Boulder, CO
He is 30 years old
He works at a technology company and makes a salary of 100,000/year
He is married and has two dogs
Once we understand who John is and what he wants, it becomes much easier to ask questions like What does John want and how can we give it to him? What are his dreams and aspirations?
This fictionalized persona can be one of many. Sometimes, our customers can be divided into groups based on gender, income, or location.
Utilizing buyer personas is a powerful marketing and sales tool for organizations building data-driven digital marketing strategies. Knowing both your core and target audience well help you communicate with them in more effective, authentic ways. Do not miss this integral part of your digital strategy.
Until next time…keep minding your business.