In order to be effective, marketing strategies need to be addressed to a specific market segment. The message you craft and send out needs to resonate with these people’s interests and beliefs, and should solve their needs and ease their pain points.
It is obvious, then, that you must know all the above details about your target customers. But how do you make your work more effective, ticking off every important part of your message against your target customers’ characteristics? This is where buyer personas help you.
To give a simple definition, a buyer persona is a prototype representation of your ideal customer, which you develop based on market research and analytical data you collect through various channels.
How do you Build a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona looks like a typical characterization of a real person. It should include the following information:
- Location
- Age group
- Education level
- Job title
- Income
- Interests
- Problems/pain points
- Objections they may raise against your products
- What motivates them to make a purchase
As you can notice, the buyer persona is very detailed–almost like a real person. In fact, marketers usually give names to buyer personas and imagine having a conversation with them while working on an ad or promotional message.
Usually, new businesses start with a basic sketch of the buyer personas. As they accumulate information from their social media marketing activities and from the website traffic data, the initial sketch is refined by supplementary traits and characteristics.
How do Buyer Personas Help your Business?
It is quite a lot of work to create a buyer persona, but it is worthwhile. Here are just a few great ways in which it helps your business:
- Create Custom Audiences for Facebook™ Advertising
The buyer persona includes all the information you need to segment and target Facebook™ users with your ads. As we have discussed in previous articles, social media ads spending increases from year to year. The only way in which you can keep up with your competitors and afford social media ad campaigns is by highly detailed targeting. This is where your buyer persona steps in to cut your ad spending and increase campaign ROI.
- Understand and Influence Purchasing Behaviour
After a time, you start to understand your buyer persona’s habits as if they were a friend or a neighbour. You know how frequently they buy your products, why they need your products, and how they use your products. This, in turn, helps you identify moments when you can make an extra sale, or persuade the client to try complementary products.
For example, if you notice that a customer buys shampoo for dry hair and hair dye, you can suggest them a nourishing mask which protects and nurtures dyed hair. It is most likely that this buyer persona pays attention to their looks and will welcome advice on how to look good and feel better about themselves.
- Build a Solid Relationship with your Customers
We make friends with people who have similar tastes, beliefs and outlooks on life to our own. And we tend to do business with companies that share our values and really strive to give us what we need. A buyer persona helps you discover your clients’ values and beliefs in order to create blog articles, social media posts and marketing materials they find interesting.
This will encourage them to communicate with you, to be active on your social media pages, to share your content and to trust your brand and your products.
- Personalise your Emails
As a general rule, a company does not have a single buyer persona, but a few. These buyer personas are similar in the most salient points, but also different in the fine details of their likes and interests.
The more detailed your buyer personas are, the easier you will find it is to create personalised emails, with the right emotional appeal and the right call to action for each separate group.
- Attract the Right People on your Website
The problem many companies face is that they have a healthy traffic funnels from social media pages and other marketing strategies, but a low conversion rate. This means that they attract the wrong people–those who are curious enough to click on an ad, but completely lack the motivation or need to buy the product.
You can solve this problem by using accurate buyer personas, and although you may note a decrease in your traffic generated by ads, your conversion rate will go up substantially.