Create Buyer Personas for Marketing Success

“Buyer personas are often met with opposition because they’re a lot of work to assemble, and once assembled they are living, evolving things and must be maintained. Like people, buyer personas change over time with the market, the times, the ebbs and flows of products and services. They absolutely require work, but they are entirely worth it.“

There are times when the businesses reach a point where their marketing feels “stuck,” business owners are under pressure to keep generating revenue and marketing teams start looking for other ideas or ways to market their products and services.

Both business owners and marketers know that they could be seeing better results than what they are seeing at the moment.

But they get stuck when they come to this question “where should we begin?”

It’s very much possible that you might be making a mistake, you may be using – the old “spray and pray” marketing technique.

If you’re pushing the marketing messages without a proper marketing and content strategy across different channels just wishing that someone takes an action on it, then you’re making that mistake.

The likely result is you won’t achieve your campaign target.

Simply put, you can’t “do marketing” without completely knowing who you’re targeting your ads to.

In any marketing plan, the first step is to define your audience.

Identifying who your customers are, what are your buyer personas and where to find them are the basis on which you plan and execute your marketing campaigns.

Why Do You Need to Develop Buyer Personas?

A customer persona or the buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer that you frame based on real data and predictive data, sometimes you also use educated speculation of what they look like.

This data usually comprises information like demographics, goals, motivations, and behaviors of your buyers.

A business might have multiple target buyer personas, and these provide vital information that can help build the marketing strategy based on this data.

For example, if you are an educational institution offering courses for Under Graduate and Graduate students, you may have different buyer personas, like:

• Students who have just passed their Senior Secondary School & want to pursue graduation full-time
• Students who have just passed their Senior Secondary School & want to pursue their graduation part-time while working
• Graduate students who want to pursue post-graduation full-time
• Graduate students who are working and want to pursue post-graduation part-time

Based on demographic information on a customer profile, you can determine the most likely online channels they will be using, and as a marketer, you should focus on that channel to reach out to your target audience with the right marketing message to attract them to your offer.

For example in the above example, these students and working professionals would be using Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram at large. It is less likely for them to use Twitter.

So the best place to advertise to attract these people is all of the above three channels.

Similarly, if your target audience is in Russia, you should focus more on vk.com than Facebook. Because vk.com is more popular in Russia than Facebook.

Is Developing Buyer Persona Required for My Business?

The simplest and most straight forward answer to this is that it will help you target your messaging across all stages of the buyer journey based on the right buyer persona.

The buyer personal helps understand the specific goals and requirements of your target audience at any stage in their buyer journey.

It will help you create and deliver clear, customized, and accurate messaging that resonates with your audience and produces more and better results.

How to Define Target Buyer Personas?

If you invest a little time in creating your buyer personas it would certainly pay you off in terms of better and targeted results from your marketing efforts.

Don’t worry, we will walk you through the steps to create a strong buyer persona for your business. Let’s see how to start building your buyer personas:

Gather Data

Nothing can beat the real data.

And when you create your buyer personas from the real data it would surely give you great results.

Creating the buyer persona on guess could be a mistake and you should avoid that.

Where can you gather the data you need to create your buyer personas? Don’t worry, we will take you through all the possible sources you can gather data from to create your buyer persona.

Below are a few suggestions:

Contact List

Most possibly you have a few people in your contact list who could be your buyers, look into your contact list, take out the names you think that you can contact to sell your products or services.

Website Analytics

Google analytics is a great source to fetch data and create your buyer personas. Check your site analytics; where have your visitors come from?

What keywords are they using to search which landed them on your website?

And chances are that you might be getting visitors for the keywords which you haven’t specifically targeted for.

Which pages your visitors spend the most time on? What age group they belong to?

Which gender is visiting your website the most? Based on this information you can create your buyer persona.

Customer Feedback

The feedback from your current customers would give you great insights into building your buyer personas.

Talk to your current customers. You can do this by running an email survey, or using forms on your website to gather the information you want.

Customer Service Team

Talk to your customer service team, they would give you valuable insights about your customers, because they are the ones who directly interact with the customers.

Based on their feedback you can build your buyer personas.

Social Listening Tools

Try social listening tools, they help you observe and participate in conversations in social media groups or forums to discover the problems, questions, and priorities your target audience would have.

An important point to note here is that direct customer feedback is the best source of information.

It includes the customers who are not happy with your services or products, the feedback data will give you insights into the reasons for their unhappiness with your brand.

You can take the necessary measures to keep your customers happy and satisfied.

Build Out Profiles

Once you have your data ready then it’s time to crunch that information and build out your buyer personas which will help your marketing teams to target the right set of audiences with the right marketing messages and right products.

Typically 3-5 profiles are enough to understand your customer segmentation and the product mix you would be offering to them.

While developing your buyer personas make sure that you keep your focus only on the relevant data.

For example, if you are selling mobile phones, it is pointless to argue on gender data. Because the same brand and make of the mobile would be used by both genders.

Follow a very simple format to build out buyer personas and try to stick to only 4 key groups of data.

This will help you eliminate any unnecessary information which would not be useful for you.

Simply put, each buyer personas will include:

Demographic Information

Demographic data will help you get data on the user’s location, job role, age group, gender, hobbies, culture, and interests.

Pick out only demographic data that is actually relevant to their need for your product or service (as mentioned earlier, mobile phones tend to be gender-neutral).

Goals, Challenges, Values, and Fears

Get an idea of what motivates them and what their priorities are.

For example, if you are a cycle manufacturer and your target audience is in the mountainous region, you would focus on making your cycle to be used on mountainous roads, should have safety features, light in weight, etc. which actually is valuable for the customer of that region.

Description of Job and Business

Understand the specific role they’re responsible for within the business they work for.

For instance, if you are selling software for marketing automation, targeting the Human Resource manager would not give you that result.

But if you target the Marketing Manager or the CEO of the company you might get the expected results.

Why? Because they are the ones who need your software and have the decision making power.

Where to Find Them

This might include what they read, watch or listen to, groups they belong to, social channels they use or forums where they hang out.

This is very important because it will let you know the places your target audience spends their time, and you need to be present there with your offer so that you can grab their attention.

Prioritize Profiles where Required

As discussed earlier, a business might have different buyer personas but based on the product, and requirement of the business you might want to prioritize the profiles of buyers to target them with a different product or a different offer.

For instance, if you want to liquidate your stock of winter clothes at the end of the season with a 35% discount.

Targeting users who have already bought the winter clothes during the season would not give you good results.

Whereas, if you target the users from the geography where winters are just going to start that would give you better results.

Or you can also target the users who visited your website during the season and didn’t buy. Most probably they would buy with the great discount you are offering.

For every buyer persona do create different campaigns to get the best results. I have experienced that doing this helps get over 300% returns on the investment.

How to Use Your Target Buyer Personas?

Once you have created your buyer personas, then you have to create the market segmentation. Which is very easy and you can do that based on your buyer personas.

When you have done that you now need to craft your marketing messages, offers, CTAs, campaigns, infographics, landing pages, etc.

Craft your messages which will resonate with your target audience.

This can come right down to the language you use. What style of pitch is likely to grab their attention?

What kind of CTA would motivate them to take action?

Now with your buyer personas ready, you know where your target audience spends their time online.

Now you can also use your buyer personas to guide any cold outreach.

You can join them in the communities, forums, groups or conferences where they like to hang out.

Most important let them understand the value your offer gives them.

Similarly, write any copy, ads with your buyer persona in mind. What sort of headline will grab their attention?

Which type of images or videos would they like? Which topics do they really want to learn about?

An important point to note here is that all your marketing activities should be clearly defined with your target audience in mind.

And the marketing campaign’s duration should be long enough so that they can take action.

Ready to Develop Your Buyer Personas?

Strong well-defined buyer personas will help marketers better identify who they need to be interacting with and to direct the marketing activities toward them.

It helps you find people or target audience for whom you can solve real problems.

This will also help you save your time and money experimenting with your marketing channels and activities to reach out to your audience.

Now is the time when you want to re-look at your buyer personas. Or if you are new then define your buyer personas.

The below table will help you easily create a strong buyer persona for your products and services.