Digital Marketing 101: What is a Buyer Persona?
Creating A Buyer Persona
As a business owner, I’m sure you’ve experienced the problem of trying to connect with potential customers with one marketing effort. You’re probably throwing content and ads out there hoping it would hook one person. By targeting everyone, you target no one.
To get the best return on money spent, it helps to segment your target audience into smaller groups that share common characteristics. To create a buyer persona, you zoom in closer on the people you want to reach by getting a better understanding of one person.
A buyer persona is a semi fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Why should I Create a Buyer Persona?
“Why should i waste my time developing a persona for just one person?”; you may ask. Buyer personas humanize your audience, making them real for you which saves you time and results in a more cost effective marketing. This will save you a lot of frustration down the road, trust me. Having a buyer persona helps to convey a stronger message because you can use the language they are used to provide solutions tailored to them.
Understanding your buyer persona makes it very easy to advertise. Example, advertising on Facebook or Twitter allows you create highly targeted ads for a specific demographics. Knowing what age, location, gender etc to select helps you better match the message with the audience most likely to purchase your product.
Before creating a buyer persona, you need to ask yourself this; “Who exactly are my customers and what problem am I solving for them?”
This step is crucial to figure out what kind of content needs to be created to attract your ideal client. Think about the words they type into the search bar when looking for your products.
HOW TO CREATE A BUYER PERSONA
The first step to creating your buyer persona is defining your buyer persona by gathering demographic information. This can include their income, gender, occupation, level of education, interests, etc. Even though this doesn’t tell you everything about your buyer persona, it’s a good starting point. You don’t really need to have a customer at this stage.
You can gather information from social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and online market places, such as Amazon, Konga and Jumia, where your product already exists. Check out the type of people engaging with your competitor’s product. Go through their profiles to get a sense of who they are, what they like and how they think to better tailor your content to connect with them.
One method I love to use to collect demography information for clients is online survey. Here you can ask questions and take polls to find out what problems your potential client is struggling with to come up with your buyer persona.
I love to take Twitter polls for surveys that are not really in depth. For proper online surveys, I use Google form . Unlike twitter polls, here you can ask deep questions and ask people to write out their problems or challenges with a product. With Google form you get a better understanding of potential clients to create that buyer persona. It’s also an easy way of collecting emails.
If you have existing customers you can use analytics to track how they found you and who engages. Installing Google analytic on your websites helps you track not just the demography but what sort of device or operating system your customers are using. This will give you a better idea of the length and type of content you should post. Facebook insights and Twitter analytics also help you understand who engages more with your product.
The final way to create a buyer persona is to simply ask. Find out what challenges your current customers is facing. What are their pain points and what do they need to make a deeper connection before purchasing your products. You can also look at yourself and ask why you started selling the product/service in the first place. What problem are you solving?
Originally published at Apptivities.