What are Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas are a relatively new concept, stemming from the rise of content marketing. The concept and usability of buyer personas can be incredibly impactful and should be an integral part of every modern marketing strategy, digital or not.
The idea behind the buyer persona is pretty simple, using statistics from actual customers, or your ideal audience, you create fake personas in order to better direct your efforts to fit towards one of your ideal audiences. Depending on the scope of your marketing strategy and how niche your product is, you can many personas or very few, and you can always add and tweak as time goes on.
Where to Start
First things first, you must know your audience, or personify your ideal audience. Start with the basics, demographics such as:
- career
- income
- size of family
- education
- religion
- age
- gender
- location
- marital status
- ethnicity
You can plug and play and come up with various different combinations to create your personas. As every business is different, so are the ideal attributes of you ideal client, apply the most important aspects to your personas.
If you are unsure of your ideal client still, take a look at your analytics or your current client base. Who did you like working with best and what attributes made you enjoy the relationship?
You can even interview past clients to try to narrow down your ideal audience and craft these personas off of them.
At this point, you want to add substance to your personas outside of just basic demographics. If you are just developing your marketing strategy, you have a little bit more flexibility in creating these personas. Ideally you will want at least a few that are vastly different, yet still in, your targeted audience.
Once you gather all of your information, it is time to put it all together!
Personality and Stories of your Clients
You will then want to create a back story for your personas. These stories and the more detailed and specific personality traits you will be able to pull from them should be relevant stories that can impact or detail how an interaction with this client should go.
You are looking to understand this person better. What are some of the goals and challenges these individuals have. Have they had any experiences that left a good or bad taste in their mouths? Ultimately, you will want to include any relevant information that can help you more specifically target this person as a consumer.
When creating my buyer personas, I try to keep it short and simple. Just a few key demographics, key goals, challenges this person may face which would lead them to seek my services, and a small blurb of personality or back story. I also like to find a random pictures through google of what this person may look like, to help put a face to the name.
I have seen people get incredibly creative with their layout for their buyer personas, and for presenting in a meeting or to anyone this will probably be the route you will like to take, but I prefer to keep mine simple on a Word document which i export to a PDF file and keep on all my devices for whenever I may need them. The choice of this is all a matter of preference and how you work.
It may also help to create negative buyer personas as well. You will need the same information, but instead of making these personas for your target audience, create them for the type of people you do not want to work with or that would not be a good fit for your product or services.
Doing this can help you identify key factors in a customer that trigger red flags pointing to someone you may not like to work with. Being able to identify these traits early can save you a ton of time, effort, and headaches down the road.
Putting it all Together
By creating these buyer personas you leverage key insights into your customers thoughts and actions, and provide yourself with a more clear and defined path when focusing your marketing campaign on key audiences.
They can be as simple or as complex as you feel they need to be, but ultimately your marketing campaigns will only improve by establishing these personas early on when developing your strategy, and utilizing them accordingly throughout.
When writing content, developing or enhancing products, making business choices, and any other situation that you involve a client in, reference these. Make them accessible, focus on these stories, emotions, and personalities, and most importantly, remember who you are appealing too when addressing a client facing choice.
Have you tried implementing buyer personas into your brands marketing strategy? Reach out on social media or by email and share the results.