As marketing continues to evolve and the need for more personalized content grows, buyer personas are becoming a necessity for businesses seeking to reach new customers. Buyer personas help marketers gain a better understanding of who their ideal customer is and how to market specifically to them.
Buyer personas are fictional profiles of your ideal customer. When developing these personas, businesses should first look to their existing customer base. Work with those who interact with customers on a regular basis?sales or customer service?to identify the traits and characteristics of the ideal customer.
As marketers, you can then use these detailed customer profiles to improve your content marketing and advertising efforts. Target your messaging to address the wants and needs of the buyer personas, creating a more personalized and effective marketing strategy.
When creating your buyer personas, the first step will be to identify their demographic. Are they male or female, middle-aged or mid-20s? Where to they live? What is their job title, and their level of education? You?ll also want to identify where they tend to get their information, whether it is traditional media, online, or a combination of the two. Be a specific as possible?the more details you include, the more real your persona becomes and the more effectively you will be able to market to them.
After you have identified who your persona is, you?ll need to dig deeper to outline their goals and challenges, both professionally and personally. Consider what they value most, how they measure success, what their biggest challenges are, what they fear and what they want most.
The more detail you include, the better your buyer persona. Many also choose to give their buyer personas a name and photo to help identify and humanize the persona.
Create buyer personas for each of your primary demographics. After you have a clear understanding of exactly who your customer is and what they want from you, you can begin marketing to them. Share content that will keep your persona engaged and interested. Your content should speak to the persona and anticipate their wants and needs.
Buyer personas will also help you to identify your most effective marketing channels. If your persona rarely uses the Internet to get their information, you will need to identify another way to best reach this audience. On the other hand, if your persona primarily uses the Internet, you?ll want to tailor your web content to meet the needs of this persona.
Detailed buyer personas can be an invaluable tool, and while they may take time to develop, the information they provide can be a major time saver for your marketing efforts. After your personas are created, you will know what type of content to offer, and what channels will be the most effective at reaching your target audience.
Businesses can use buyer personas to identify which social media platforms to use and to determine what type of content is most effective. Target your messages to your buyer personas, and focus your marketing efforts on the avenues in which they are most likely to use and see your message.
Creating buyer personas clearly identifies each of your primary customer types and their demographics, wants, needs, and preferences. Using buyer personas will help target your marketing for more effective messaging. You will be able to create more personalized marketing messages that truly speak to the customer, increasing your return on investment.
As your company grows and evolves, so should your buyer personas. Your customer?s wants and needs will change as will your products and services. Create buyer personas for each type of customer you encounter, and utilize content marketing and automation to reach each persona with the type of content most relevant to them.