Crafting buyer personas allows you to create targeted content for your ideal customers. Buyer personas are developed so that you can always refer back to your audience’s wants and needs when building your marketing strategy and campaigns.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of a fictional person that represents your target audience. This ideal customer or client embodies the characteristics of your best potential customers.
When you create your buyer persona, you give them a name, assign their demographic details, and decide their interests and behavioural traits. You can even put a face to your persona using stock photography, making the fictional person just a little more real.
Buyer personas help you…
understand customers’
- personal or professional goals
- pain points
- buying patterns.
This will shape your messaging across all marketing tactics so think about this persona as if they were a real person.
When you have someone specifically in mind that you’re marketing to, communication with your target audience should become easier. Think about how you’d interact with your persona on social media, how you’ll get them to engage with your emails, and what you want their buying behaviour to be.
You might need to create a few buyer personas depending on what services or products your business offers. Segmenting your customer base into these different personas will help you learn more about them and how to better market to them.
How to use buyer personas: Think about it from your customer’s perspective
Don’t approach your messaging strategy with what you want to accomplish, but how can you provide what your customer needs?
What are your potential and current customers’ priorities? Keep your personas in mind when making marketing strategy decisions – will your campaign address the goals or pain points of your customers?
Ensure your plans always meet the needs of your personas and the real customers will follow. With brand loyalty and trust comes sales, so don’t forget to put yourself in your customers’ shoes when developing your strategy.
With persona you can:
1. Improve targeted advertising
With digital marketing tactics, it’s easy to create and track targeted campaigns. You can set up different ad sets that appeal to your various customer segments and get detailed results.
You can take a segmented approach to your email marketing as well. You could develop different lead nurturing streams for all your segments based on your customer personas.
With more sophisticated targeting practices, you’ll see click throughs, conversion rates, and ad performance improve.
2. Increase ROI
The buyer spring, a model for connecting your buyer personas and business objectives will help increase your return on investment. It’s called a spring because it involves three defined loops.
- The first is what kinds of content will appeal to your buyer personas.
- The second is what social media channels will your persona use the most.
- And the third is the data that lets you track your campaigns, report performance, and pivot strategy if needed.
Each loop includes four points where you plan, act, observe, and reflect.
Help to get started with creating your personas
Creating buyer personas, especially if you need multiple personas, can be a daunting task. Don’t worry, building buyer personas is part of Marketing Square’s marketing strategy services. If you need help creating personas to better market to your customers, get in touch with us today.