Buyer persona is a popular buzzword in the marketing industry. For starters, it serves as a representation of your ideal customers, such as goals, demographics, and interests. Marketers often create “buyer personas” to make sure their marketing strategy resonates with their target audience.
Now how can you create your own buyer persona for your content strategy? Here’s what you need to know.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target audience. This may encompass their background, demographic information, goals, hobbies, and interests.
Here’s an example of a buyer persona from Hubspot:
Buyer personas help you and your team understand your target audience. They help marketers and salespeople tailor your content, marketing strategy, and product development with the profile of your customers — so they address customers' needs and expectations.
Let’s say you’re a travel agency that wants to attract travel-starved customers. Do you know the goals and challenges of your target audience? How will your products and services address their needs?
To create content and campaigns that speak to specific customers, you have to build personas and keep them in mind when building your strategy.
Even if it’s possible to create a one-size-fits-all approach, buyer personas help with personalization. Marketers reportedly achieve a 20% increase in revenue due to personalization. Meanwhile, 70% of brands that rely on advanced personalization are more likely to attain 200% ROI from their efforts.
Buyer personas enable marketers to create personalized content that speaks to their target audience.
Consider this scenario: you’re a tourist agency looking to launch marketing campaigns that appeal to retirees. Having a buyer persona compels your team to brainstorm targeted content that aligns with the circumstances of senior citizens. For example, you could create blog posts on mobility-friendly tours, cruises, and activities that older people can enjoy.
Done right, buyer personas can also complement the different stages in your sales funnel. You could generate awareness for your travel packages by promoting them at senior meetup groups or organizations. Once you've managed to lure a few prospects, you can deliver targeted emails and newsletters to foster their interest.
Let’s take a look at more ways personas can empower your marketing efforts:
Ready to create your first buyer persona? First, you’ll need to know the right steps. In this article, we’ll outline how you can create an effective buyer persona for your business.
Some marketers and businesses create buyer personas based on their perceived profile of their customers. It’s not wrong per se; however, the ideal buyer persona should be based on real data from surveys and market research to make them more effective.
Conduct market research to understand who your customers are and what exactly their profile looks like.
Here are some ways you can learn more about your customers:
After conducting research, you’ll have a lot of raw data to work with. From there, you can identify patterns and trends to build your first few personas. Over time, you can modify these personas or add more to your existing list as you learn more about your customers.
Now that you have a lot of the data, the next step is to sort through the demographic information. Divide your buyer personas based on location, age, education level, ethnicity, and income level.
Let’s say you’re a car retailer that wants to target young professionals looking to buy a car. Your buyer persona could look something like this:
At this stage, you’ll want to figure out the motivations of consumers across different buyer personas. Why would they need your product or service? What are their goals? Are there several obstacles or challenges that would stop them from achieving this goal?
Looking back at our previous example, young professionals may want to buy cars because public transportation in their area is inconvenient. They may want to travel farther distances to go on trips with their friends or spend more time with their family.
Here’s an example:
Amy is a professional that commutes at least 2 hours per day. She has a stable career and belongs to the upper-middle class. She also loves to travel frequently to hang out with friends and family.
Amy is looking for a vehicle that offers outstanding fuel economy because she commutes around 70 miles each day and plans to travel outside the city during weekends. We recommend car model X, car model Y, and car model Z as her best options.
Next, you can also evaluate the behavior of your target consumers.
Let’s say the customer in your buyer persona is a bachelor constantly browsing car models to impress dates or friends. In this case, you may opt to promote luxury vehicles for this persona. On the other hand, if they’re more likely to ask about affordable and reliable cars, you could recommend a smaller, compact vehicle.
A good tip is to name your buyer persona — so customers can easily distinguish them. You can give them memorable names such as “Bachelor Brad” or “Young Enthusiast Sady”.
Looking at consumer behavior will help you identify the main selling point of your product or service. It can also serve as a guide for the advertising and promo materials you’ll create for your audience.
Get in touch with your customer-facing staff to understand who your customers are and what their needs are. Ask them to prepare conversations for a specific persona. You can use this information to improve their sales scripts, as well as to decide the communication strategy for your marketing campaigns.
Alternatively, you can also prepare a list of objections customers might say and how to respond to them. By getting the perspective of your client-facing sales teams, you’re more likely to improve your marketing campaigns too.
Decide on the message and brand voice that you’ll use when communicating with a specific buyer persona. Include examples of real quotes or the elevator pitch that your team can use to introduce your product or service. These can serve as a guide for whenever marketers need to craft copy for customers, as well as client-facing staff that has conversations with leads and customers on a regular basis.
Understanding your buyer personas will help you pinpoint the social media platforms and marketing channels where you should market your products.
For example, if your buyer persona is around 15 to 20 years old who watches TikTok videos, livestreams and user-generated content — then you should create these content types as well.
Here’s an example:
Our millennial customers gain information by:
As time passes, the profile of your customers, as well their needs and behavior, will change.
Evaluate your buyer personas on a regular basis to make sure that it is still relevant. Perform market research and launch surveys annually to gain new insights about your target market.
The more information you have, the more likely you’ll be able to create effective buyer personas or modify existing ones. In addition, your buyer personas will be able to adapt to trends and current events.
Now that you know the steps for creating your buyer personas, it’s time to build your own.
Before anything else, do some research on your target customers through surveys and interviews. From there, you can segment your prospects based on their demographics, motivations, attributes, and behavior.
Make your persona as accurate as possible to come up with a marketing strategy that will resonate with your audience. You’ll also be able to make your products and services align with their specific needs.
Struggling to create your first buyer persona? Get in touch with Fiverr marketers who offer buyer persona services to help you successfully meet your project planning goals and deadline.