All businesses want to reach their ideal customers, but how do they know who they are? That’s where a buyer persona kicks in. Research and data behind your consumers’ activity – such as the top-selling product, where most consumers are coming from, or your trending social media posts – are essential when it comes to developing detailed buyer personas. Knowing your customers is essential when developing detailed buyer personas. Businesses need to research and collect in-depth data on their customers’ activities, including where most customers are coming from, the top-selling product, and trending social media posts.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
Data and research points can combine to form a fictional representation of who your ideal customers might be, making it easier for marketers to target the customers that are most likely to engage with their content.
Why Is Creating Buyer Personas Essential?
When a business creates a detailed set of buyer personas, they are much more likely to increase their sales and scale their business since their content is reaching audiences that are interested in what they can offer. This ensures streamlining your business to new horizons with definite prospects.
Let’s say that a business specializes in marketing tools, such as keyword research tools, and needs to create a buyer persona. Their buyer personas will include people who are starting out with digital marketing and want to know more about SEO tools. Now that the business understands the search intent to target those customers, they can create blog posts.
Since this specific buyer persona defines customers in their awareness stage, the business can create blog posts on their website where they market their product, thus driving sales and engagement to their website.
An example of such a blog post is “10 Free Keyword Research Tools.”
In this way, they have converted prospects into customers by creating a blog post that answers their search query with the business’s own product.
It is important to note that your business can have a single buyer persona or at least 10 or 20. Each customer is unique and needs to be targeted differently based on their stage in the buyer’s journey and their intent to buy or use your product. However, if you’re new to creating and defining buyer personas, it is recommended that you start small and build your way up. To make this process easier, businesses and marketers can always use tools that help simplify the process. HubSpot’s Buyer Persona Templates can be an essential resource that can help streamline the process.
How to Create a Detailed Buyer Persona?
To create a detailed buyer persona, you’ll start by giving them a name and some background details, such as their demographic and behavioral traits. It would be best if you defined your buyer persona in a way that is similar to defining a specific person. These details aren’t based on your imagination; instead, they are based on actual data and research that you will need to conduct. By creating a ‘fictional’ real person, you’ll be able to understand what kind of marketing strategy to use to target them and make them into your loyal customers.
Number 1: Conduct Thorough Audience Research
It might be overwhelming to go through all the data to develop and understand your research, but it can be made easier if you start to ask yourself these questions: Who are our existing customers? Which social media platform receives the most engagement? How old are our returning customers? Who are my competitors’ targets? By asking questions, you can formulate a methodology for conducting and grouping your research findings for your business. To compile all the data, you can use your social media analytics provided by the platform. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram can help you find in-depth data about who’s viewing your content and engaging with it.
Google Analytics and your consumer dashboard can help provide you with essential data such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Language
- Interests
- Social Media Platforms
- Challenges
- Goals
- Company Size.
Demographics will help you target specific types of customers using content optimized for them. If a business has a customer base that involves teenagers, then their content will be optimized for them, and they’ll focus on creating graphics and social media posts on sites they usually frequent, such as TikTok and Instagram. Comparatively, a business whose customer base consists largely of older people who regularly use social media such as Facebook or YouTube, the business will focus on creating more content on their social media pages that is likely to interest them.
Don’t forget that conducting interviews and carrying out surveys can also help you develop more robust buyer personas for your business since you’ll have an in-depth understanding of your customer base through information directly from them.
Number 2: Identify Your Customers’ Challenges and Goals
At this stage of developing buyer personas, you’ll have to ask these questions: What are my customer’s goals? What do they want to achieve? What do they struggle with? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to identify strategies to market to your customers. By knowing what they want to achieve and what they struggle with, you’ll be able to create and target your content to help them overcome those struggles, achieve those goals, and better improve your already available services. To do this, you might have to do some ‘social listening.’ Social listening is going on social platforms and seeing what people are saying about your business. By doing so, businesses can gain insight into what customers like and dislike and what they might want to see in the future.
Number 3: How You Can Help?
Now that you’ve analyzed their motivations, pain points, and their goals, you’ll need to come up with ways to help them. Analyze the products and services that you have to offer and determine what stage of the buyers’ journey your customers are on. For example, Lululemon recently launched a campaign where users can re-sell their ‘gently-used’ clothing on their website. This initiative stemmed from analyzing their users’ buyer personas who might have shown a keen interest in sustainable fashion practices. In this way, Lululemon successfully catered to their users’ goals of being more sustainable.
Number 4: Create Marketing Messages for Your Personas
At this stage, you should know your personas’ interests, motivations, goals, and the challenges they face. Using this insight, you’ll need to develop specific messages that you know your personas will lean towards. This is where interview and survey data are most helpful. Businesses can use direct quotes from their customers and tailor them into marketing messages.
Number 5: Naming Your Personas
The last step is to name your buyer personas in a general group to identify their demographic and streamline the process when discussing and producing marketing strategies.
Are you still struggling to create detailed buyer personas for your business? If you want this process streamlined and conducted by an expert in this field, head on down to my Upwork profile, and we can set up a meeting to discuss how to increase your sales and scale your business today!
