Marketing Avatars: How to Build Buyer Personas to Change your Marketing Game
Building Epic Buyer Personas to Target your Marketing Efforts with an Infographic Example
Stay-at-home dad Stephen.
Aspiring Chef Cheryl.
Married Martha.
Self-obsessed Sania.
Business owner Ben.
Mega-marketer Mel.
What exactly are these fictional sounding epithets?
They are exactly that- fictionalized, general representations of a group of people who share common needs, traits or values. These are buyer persona constructions. Grouping your customer profiles together in this way helps marketers custom-design their content to different groups of people, so their aim reaches the dead center.
Remember the five factions from the Divergent movie series where people are segregated into separate groups based on their personality traits? Building buyer personas is somewhat similar. Well, let’s hope your customers don’t find out about this lest they revolt!
Buyer personas may be variably called as ‘marketing personas’ or ‘customer personas.’ Personas can be implemented in your content to complement your entire funnel strategy.
The Case for Building Buyer Personas
There is too much noise and spam in the advertising world. Who wants to be bombarded with irrelevant marketing messages day in and day out?
When it comes to inbound strategy, most marketers will agree that it is important to create content that people love. And it is even more important that you create content that the right people love. Content that is created for an audience that is too broad face, fails to significantly reach anyone. This is so important and relevant that about 47% of savvy companies have stated that content targeting is the topmost priority when it comes to creating content. This entails creating clear buyer personas
Precisely, the type of customers who have a fundamental need for your product and who are either bound to stay loyal to you or recommend you to people they know to put a positive word in for you. That is, these are a subtype of a large target that you need to influence.
When done right, you should be able to narrow and tighten the focus on the style of messaging and voice that is needed to convert visitors to leads and eventually into paying customers.
Top marketers are known to spend more time and money concentrating on market demographics and use focus groups to ascertain the possible customer reactions to their campaign. Buyer Personas can be utilized even by SMEs to improve the way they target customers.
The Mighty Six
Here are six important areas to begin building personas with:
- Demographics
The first step when it comes to building buyer personas is to collect the essential facts about your ideal customer. In case you are a B2B company, what kind of businesses are you trying to deal with? What are their niches and industry-specifics? This, probably is, the best way to start your profiling since this kind of data is easily available through CRM software, cookies, etc.
2. Pain-Points
A pain point may be described as a need that is causing an individual some kind of discomfort or trouble. It would be something your customer has been searching a solution for. The pain point may be say hair fall or high-interest rates on house loans or the need for easy-to-wear diapers. You should know why this buyer persona needs your company and how you can best solve their problems
3. Priorities
What are your customers’ top priorities? Do they worry about the image they are projecting to their peer group? Do they have budget constraints? Do your executive customers have a need to satisfy a demanding boss? Are they doting parents? Do they have an inclination towards reading features and making an informed decision?
Having this kind of information on hand can allow you to remove the fluff and go right to where you want to be — your positioning. If they are budget conscious buyers, you would be better off focusing on offers and be providing value. If they are image-conscious, you should be able to device a message that would allow them to associate your product with status and so on.
4. Values
What are the core values of your ideal customer? Are they aggressive business players? Are they social-conscious? Conservative, maybe? Are they people-centric? Values are fundamentally different from priorities. Priorities may shift and they make for lesser details. Values form over-arching bigger pictures. Values should guide your brand’s entire presentation. You should be able to demonstrate how your values align with those of your consumers and how you can achieve a common goal together.
5. Research Habits
Research habits can be derived from the kind of keywords that fetch the highest traffic volume to your site, the kind of referral sources your customers come from and such qualitative metrics. You may even involve closed loop analytics where you can ascertain how leads are created, which pages within your website make them take action, what other parts of your site they engage the most with. Some valuable insights about your customers’ browsing habits can go a long way in assessing your customers’ personas. Are they constantly involved online or are they just discovering the social media?
6. Psychographic Characteristics
Psychographic characteristics would comprise of your customers’ opinions, attitudes, and inclinations. General personality traits that is. This is where advertising meets psychology. Would your ideal customer spend their Sundays cooking brunches for their family or chill out by the beach? Are they early adopters or they shun technology till the point they no longer can do so?
Your content marketing initiatives can become infinitely more effective if you can tell how your product fits into the larger dimensions of your buyer persona.
Here’s an example of how a buyer persona is built and used
Building buyer personas will help you identify with customer needs and leverage your product or service in a way that truly solves their needs. When you solve their problem, it creates a positive loop. You win, and they win.
Once you have built up your personas, you can go on to create content that fits their needs, goals, priorities and values. This will go a long way in empathizing with your customers and create better experiences for them as they go through your funnel.And that’s how you truly create brand loyalists.
