In marketing, a buyer persona plays a key role in identifying, attracting, and then engaging potential clients. When you have a buyer persona that’s customer-centric, it gives you an edge over competitors because it provides an understanding of the profiles of your prospective clients.
A buyer persona, if you have created one before, is a fictional representation of who you see as your ideal customer. The representation will have information about them, like their location, demographic details, interests, age, previous buying habits, and pain points.
When you have personas that are well-researched, you understand the wants and needs of your customers and how you can optimize your marketing as well as your products and services to address those wants and needs.
5 Tips to Create a Buyer Persona
The following are five key tips for creating a buyer persona.
1. Research
The most important thing you’re going to do as you create buyer personas is research. You need to gather data that are accurate and going to help you learn more about the demographic characteristics of your targeted customers. As you’re researching, think about the people who would want to spend money with you and why they’d be compelled to do that.
You’ll want to identify the information that your targeted customer would need to make an informed decision.
You can use customer analytics from your social media, Google analytics, your customer database, and from customer feedback.
If you don’t yet have a big customer base because you’re a startup, you can look at market research tools, you can do competitor research, or can buy data from data providers. You can also make sure you’re keeping up with all the news and trends in the industry.
2. Consider Interviews
As part of your research, if you have the opportunity and resources to conduct interviews, it’s likely to be worthwhile to do so.
As you’re reaching out to referrals, current customers, or other people you plan to interview, you may have to incentivize them to participate. Let them clearly know it’s not a sales call and make it easy for them to commit to an interview. For each persona you’re creating, three to five interviews are ideal.
If you get the chance to interview real people to create your personas, you want to make sure you’re asking why. You’ll have a set of questions for the interviewee to answer, and after their answer to each, ask them to elaborate by explaining why.
3. Bring Together Your Research Into a Profile
Once you have a combination of qualitative and quantitative research and details, you can pull everything together. It’s a good idea to give the persona a name and perhaps use a stock photo because it’ll just make the persona all the more real to you so that you can speak directly to that person in your marketing.
As you’re creating the profile, you want to write a brief and concise description of the person.
As you’re creating the persona, you want to understand more than anything else the end goals and ambitions of your buyer. Understand what’s keeping them from achieving their ambitions and goals and how you can help them with their challenges to meet their goals.
4. Integrate Personas Into Your Marketing
Your personas need to be a real part of all of your marketing plans because when you make these personas central to everything you’re doing, it’s going to keep you customer-centric.
When you’re developing marketing and content, first make sure that everything you’re proposing to them is going to solve problems for them and meet their needs.
Make sure that you’re using terminology they’re going to understand and that will resonate with them.
You can use your personas to create tailored content that’s relevant to specifically segmented audiences. You can also tailor your ad spend, helping you improve your ROI.
You can separate your contact list based on personas, and you can prioritize your personas so that you make sure that you’re getting the most success with each one. You want to understand, too, why one persona might be more effective than another and work on replicating that.
5. Use Personas to Make Business Decisions
Finally, you want a defined buyer persona to help you make other business decisions.
For example, your personas are going to help you understand where to spend your time on social media because you should have an idea of where your ideal customers are. You can also create comparison pages and sales collateral comparing yourself to your competitors and emphasizing where you come out on top.
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