Are you just starting your journey into the world of marketing? If so, you may not know about audience and buyer personas. And that’s okay.
When just starting out, you have to heavily focus on building an audience and providing services they will want to buy. Don’t worry if you have no idea where to start. This post will cover buyer personas, identifying the differences between buyer personas and the target audience as a whole.
Basically, your target audience is the total servable market, but a buyer persona represents members of your target audience in a more special way.
To create a persona, you’ll use all the information you can collect from your target audience.
How Should You Build Your Buyer Personas?
In the modern world, a business won’t grow if the representatives are blind to the customer’s desires. It’s very important to know the people for whom their company services or builds products for.
Many businesses prefer to communicate with the customer in person, listening to their opinions and advice. With this information i hand, they can create products and/or services that solve real problems for the customer.
This knowledge will also help businesses add value, provide a sense of happiness, and eliminate the customer’s main fears that might dissuade buying.
This post will spell the whole process out for you. Then, you will be able to create effective audience personas more easily.
Information Needed to Create a Buyer Persona
Background
- Location: Where does he or she live?
- Education: University, Field of Study, Degree
- Specialty or professional experience
- Marital Status
- Parental Status: Do they have children? If yes, how many?
Demographics
- Gender
- Age
- Income or Income Band (e.g. top 10% or bottom 50%0)
- Location of Work
Online Behaviors
- Active social media accounts.
- What is the main social media account that they mostly use?
Identifiers
- What do they like to do?
- Interests: Hobbies, Pasttimes, Activities, etc.
Purpose
- What do they expect and prefer to have?
Their Challenges / Pain Points
- Why did they decide to use the service you provide?
- What is the advantage of choosing your service or product over other alternatives?
General Characteristics
- Data not covered above
You may need to see examples to understand what this actually means. So besides walking you through all of the steps, I will include examples to help make it more clear when creating buyer personas
This whole effort is probably harder than you might think it will be. It will require a lot of research, including questions asked directly to your customers themselves. Then you’ll need to fully understand it to proceed.
When you use a target audience persona like the example below, your business will be able to find and address the challenges and potentials of the members of your target audience.
Example of a Full Buyer Persona
Background
- Lives in Colorado
- Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Part-time Social media marketing student, full-time worker as accounts manager
- Single
Demographics
- Female
- 25 years old
- Household income of $40,000
- She prefers to use her credit/ debit cards
Online Behaviors
- Smartphone and laptop user
- Uses Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter
- Active on Facebook
Identifiers
- Loves singing and likes to visit museums, but doesn’t get outside too often
- Recycles, loves nature, and cares about it
Challenges / What Problem Is She Trying to Fix?
- Need to improve conversion rates on websites with more relevant content
- Wants to ensure that all customers are satisfied with the level of service and products provided by her organization
Bio
Customer Accounts Manager is overseeing between 300 and 400 accounts in her current role. She is single with no children and enjoys spending time with family and friends.
Lives in Colorado and commutes into Leeds City Centre on a daily basis for work.
The company where she works employs 38 members of staff. The team she works with consists of seven individuals and includes all customer accounts in Colorado plus some from Oklahoma.
Characteristics
- She is introvert
- Likes to enjoy coffee alone
Advantages of Creating Buyer Personas
We’ve shared several reasons you want to generate buyer personas for your own company. Let’s dig into a full list of how you’ll benefit from this exercise. With buyer personas in hand, you’ll be able to:
- Perform the right, effective targeting
- Create content with your customer in mind, as you have already imagined them to be
- Identify customer requirements and interests
- Improve the quality of services & products
- Deliver the right message through social media
- Understand the direction of your focus and time
I mentioned interviewing customers as the best way to gather information. While that is true, you can also collect it in a variety of ways, including polls on social media.
In fact, the interview itself may be very similar to the poll. For instance, you can create Google forms and send these to your customers. If you do it right, you can promise they’ll finish it within one, two, or five minutes.
So we have three main ways to conduct an interview, as follows:
- Online
- Available for phone calls
- At your company or store
The questions may be different depending on the field of activity. Here I mentioned only the most important ones, but you can add other questions, of course, if they suit your business.
There are a lot of tools available to help you generate good buyer personas. So, don’t worry!
Conclusion
In order to know the needs and requirements of your customer, every business, first of all, should know where their clients work, who they work with, how old they are, where they live, and even where they like to go. This is called a buyer persona.
When you understand and compose explicitly for members of your audience, content marketing works best.
And once your personas are perfected, you will benefit in many ways including efficiency and increases in revenue. The upside is absolutely worth the effort!
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
This guest post brought to you courtesy of Return On Now, Professional Austin SEO and PPC Services Company.
Vera Mirzoyan
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- How to Build Buyer Personas - July 13, 2021
