Building a Better Buyer Persona

If you are an Affiliate Marketer, then you know that your revenue depends on audience targeting and driving traffic to your site to generate leads. While there are plenty of tools at your disposal to assist with your lead generation and distribution, one of your most challenging tasks can be how to capture people’s attention. More specifically, it can be difficult determining precisely whose attention you are supposed to capture.

No matter how much technology you have at your disposal, if you don’t have guidance when it comes to knowing what audience segments you should be targeting it can all be a waste of time and resources. The problem of not having a clear vision of who you should direct your marketing efforts towards can be helped by creating a buyer persona.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a more technical term to describe what many businesses would describe as a “typical customer.” It is the personification of your consumer demographics, but more than that it is an important step in building a bridge between the data you collect and the people you need to reach.

The buyer persona can be useful because it humanizes the sometimes faceless sea of prospects that you are reaching out to. In looking at a person, rather than a pie chart, you’ll be able to think more creatively about your marketing strategy. Even if you seek a broad audience, you can likely create multiple buyer personas to leave no stone unturned.

An example of how a buyer persona can help: let’s say you’ve decided your buyer persona is a working mother from a household that earns between $80k-$90k. You can make assumptions then: that she shops for deals on groceries and household goods; that the family might save and plan for vacations (and not just take them on a whim); that she juggles a busy schedule with her family and work. With all this information, you can create better content, more specifically targeted ads, and opportunities that will stand out to her (and others like her). The more engaging content you put out, the more leads you can expect to generate.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

The key to creating a buyer persona is to be thorough and creative with your details. The more specifics you can use in building your buyer persona, the more you will learn about them — thus increasing your chances of sparking inspiration for your marketing campaigns.

Step #1: Gather Data from Customers

The first and most important step is to have good data on your customers. Perhaps you already have plenty of data that you have collected from past campaigns and surveys. Try to make sure you cover the basic information like gender, income, geographic location, and the like.

If you don’t already have that information from your customers, send out a friendly survey. You can also utilize your social media audience to get demographic data. Anything that provides you with more information about who is interested in your business is useful.

Step #2: Get More Information from Online Research

Once you have gotten plenty of data concerning your most recent site visitors and customers, you’ll want to perform more research to supplement that information. Look up trends in your industry — who should you be targeting that you’re not? Is your message reaching the right people? Take all that additional background information into consideration. Ideally you can amass a small treasure trove of information on your buyer persona(s).

Step #3: Place that Persona in the Real World

This step takes a little extra brainpower, but it can also be fun. Use all that information to sketch out a real person. What is their name? How old are they? What schools did they go to? What do they eat for breakfast?

Here you can play a little “if this is true, what else is true?” Suppose your persona is a girl named Jamie who just finished college in Boston. Chances are her living expenses are high and she’s paying down some student debt. She probably is looking for ways to save money, but she’s still educated and living in a big city so she may also spend on things like drinks and going out to eat. This can tell you how she is likely to spend her money, where she might see your ads, and what kind of content she would read.

Dive deep with a list of questions for your persona: what are their hopes? Their fears? How do they communicate? What social networks do they use? What are they looking for to make their lives better? Once you start pulling all this together, you may already see how incredibly valuable it can be in shaping your marketing strategy.