Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Why are buyer personas important for your business?
- How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?
- Tips to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer
Personas - How to use your buyer persona
- Time to create your own buyer persona!
Introduction
As a kid, many of us had imaginary friends, which could be anything from a talking dog to an animated princess.
For social media marketers, this might be in the form of buyer personas or audience personas – which are more than just pretend characters; they provide an immensely useful tool for targeting your ideal customer!
A buyer persona is a semi fictional representation of your target audience. This persona is based on extensive research and data of your existing or desired audience.
It’s also known as a customer persona, a marketing persona, or an audience persona.
But before we dive into the process of creating a buyer persona, let’s take a moment to examine the impact of well-crafted buyer personas on your business.
Why are buyer personas important for your business?
Developing a buyer persona can assist in gaining a better understanding of your target customers. This allows you to customize your messaging, product offerings, and services to align with the needs, behaviors, and preferences of your target audience.
When making decisions about your social media marketing strategies or overall marketing strategies, it is important to keep buyer personas in mind.
If your campaign fails to meet the needs and goals of at least one of your buyer personas, it’s time to reconsider your strategy.
Personas allow you to tailor or personalize your marketing to specific segments of your audience.
With buyer personas in hand, you can build better lead nurturing programs to improve lead quality for your business.
How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?
Conduct Thorough research
A great first step in creating a buyer persona is to do a thorough research on your audience.
Identify the customers who are already using your products or services, your social audience and your competitor’s customers.
Narrow in on details like:
- Location
- Career and working life
- Age
- Consumer habits
- Spending power and patterns
- Finances
- Personality and personal life
- Online behavior
Here are some suggestions on where to find this data:
1. Gather insights from Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the best place to collect relevant demographic information about your website visitors.
Topping up Digital Analytics with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and other analytics platforms can provide valuable insights into customers’ interests, habits, and behaviors.
2. Scour Social Media
In order to effectively communicate with your target audience, it is essential to identify which social media platforms they use.
Use tools like Keyhole.co, Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch and Google Analytics to find out which social channels your audience frequently use.
3. Integrate a Feedback Poll or Survey on your website
By integrating a Feedback Poll or Survey on your website, you can collect responses from passersby on your website as well as from the competitors’ customers.
Either you can manually add a feedback poll to your site or you can use tools like Hotjar, which also provides analytics on the behavior of users while browsing your website.
4. Conduct Market research
Market research offers invaluable data to uncover consumer behavior that can immensely benefit the buyer persona profile.
Market Explorer is a useful tool to identify the biggest market players within a given location which will provide key insights into industry’s characteristics.
Furthermore, Traffic Analytics’ Traffic Journey Report can reveal how customers find competitors’ sites, enabling marketers to understand what strategies are being used effectively.
Determine the customer’s goals and pain points
Understanding your customers’ aspirations and motivations is of paramount importance when marketing your products or services.
Knowing what drives them to purchase your product can work wonders for the success of your business.
Similarly, gaining insight into their concerns and complications will provide you with a greater understanding of consumer behavior which in turn aids your marketing strategy.
To gain this valuable information, you should consider engaging in social listening, social media sentiment analysis and consulting both customer support and sales teams, who may have more tangible knowledge about your customer.
Understand how you can benefit users
Now that you have a clear understanding of what your customers are struggling with and their ultimate goals, it’s time to think about how your product or service can best serve them.
The features of your product or services must be explored as well as the inherent benefits that come with its use.
Ask yourself, how will this make my customer’s life easier or better?
Additionally, take into account where your followers are in their buying journey and what the major purchasing obstacles might be.
By asking yourself this important question, you’ll be able to turn the features of your offering into clear, tangible benefits for your customers.
Make your buyer personas
Take all of your research, from surveys and interviews to social media and arrange it based on the commonalities between different customers. Put those characteristics into a common format.
You can use HubSpot’s Make My Persona generator as well as download the HubSpot’s persona templates to simplify the process of creating different personas.
In order to make these personas more relatable, add elements like names, images, jobs, goals, and personal stories. This way they can come alive in your mind’s eye as you strategize and develop marketing efforts.
Tips to Find Interviewees for Researching Buyer Personas
Gathering valuable insight into who your buyer persona is can be a difficult yet rewarding task.
One of the most integral steps is to find a few people to speak with and truly understand what drives them. Fortunately, there are many resources available to locate potential interviewees:
1. Use Your Existing Customers
Your existing customers are an ideal base of people to interview as they’ve already shown an interest in your product.
Don’t only talk to people who adore your product but also talk to the customers who are dissatisfied with your product as that will exhibit other patterns which will assist you in developing a solid understanding of your personas.
2. Use your prospects
It is a good idea to interview your current prospects and leads because you already have their contact information.
Utilize the data gathered through lead generation forms or website analytics to find out who might fit into your target personas.
Tools like Enlyft can help create custom buyer persona profiles, making it easier to identify the right prospects to communicate with.
3. Use your referrals
In order to effectively identify individuals who fit your target personas, obtaining referrals may be necessary, especially if you are entering new markets or do not have any leads or customers yet.
Utilize your network of contacts (such as colleagues, current customers, and social media connections) to identify potential individuals.
4. Use third-party networks
For interviewees who are external to your company, several third-party networks can be leveraged for recruiting. For instance UserTesting.com allows you to run remote user testing (with some follow-up questions).
How to use your buyer persona
Once you’ve developed your buyer persona, it will play a critical role in all of your marketing efforts and in the overall success of your business.
Utilize your persona to guide your content production, communication style, and advertising initiatives.
When you create content related to your brand or making decisions that impact your audience, it’s important to think carefully about who you are writing for.
Keeping them in mind will help ensure that they are finding the content relevant and worth their time.
Your persona can also be instrumental in helping you understand what other pain points you can solve for them, and plan for any potential problems they may face further down the line. Writing directly to your persona is an essential part of creating successful content that really resonates with its intended audience.
Time to create your own buyer persona!
Creating a buyer persona for your product is essential if you want to have success with digital products.
Not only will it help optimize your communication, but it will also improve your marketing strategies.
Your buyer persona should be considered when creating content, email marketing plans, social media campaigns and more. It’s one of the most important steps in successfully selling your product.
We hope this article has enabled you to gain a better understanding of buyer personas and how to create one for your business. Now it’s your turn!
