How to Develop and Use a Buyer Persona, and why it’s the most effective marketing tactic in understanding your target audience. In a saturated market, it’s important to know who your audience really is. Whether your customer is a Millennial, artisanal coffee shop owner or a YouTube obsessed Gen-Zer, developing a buyer persona allows you to dig deeper into the minds of your target audience.
Buyer personas are characters created for your brand based on the ideal customer your company would like to attract. This marketing strategy works because of its innate ability to help you relate to your audience as human beings. Understanding what resonates with your target market, or excites them, is crucial for making effective content and products. The process of creating this character usually entails extensive market research and interviewing. Although creating a buyer persona sounds time-consuming, it’s well worth it.
How To Develop a Buyer Persona
Research, research, research. Dig deep. Conduct interviews and create surveys for your target audience. Figure out what your current customers like, or don’t like, about you. You can use this information to create multiple brand personas.
Some questions to ask yourself are below:
- How are customers finding you?
- What are some things that your salespeople have observed consistently when speaking with customers?
- Does your target market have distinct mannerisms or speaking habits?
Learning how your audience speaks can help you identify key buzzwords that will help you draw your customers in.
What To Do After Research
Sift through your research. After obtaining a vast amount of data, it’s time to look for trends. Do you see any key patterns that stand out? If so, these are the things you will want to make note of. Do all of your customers use a certain phrase? Do they all find your business through a google search? Use these key patterns to develop a single buyer persona profile. You can make multiple personas depending on how varied your data set is.
Creating the Character
Now that you have all of your research done and have identified key patterns, it’s time to create your model customer. Start by writing down the basics: background, demographics, and preferences. This category should be extremely detailed and include their: sex, location, age, income, education, career, relationship status and preferred method of contact.
Next, you will want to identify what motivates your customers. Look through your research to find out what your customer really wants. After you pinpoint a few key motivations, create goals. Write down two goals of your target that consistently came up throughout your research. Some example goals could be: increase brand awareness, grow social media following or decrease customer dissatisfaction.
Furthermore, you will want to record two consistent challenges your customer faces – a primary and a secondary. Following this, elaborate on how you plan to solve the problems that are listed above.
Finally, turn your buyer persona into an actual person. This can be done by giving the persona a name. Put a face to the name by purchasing a stock photo that depicts the qualities of your creation. This will give you a life-like look into the life of your customer
Putting it All Together
You’ve done your research and created your buyer persona. What do you do now? Make changes. Assuming that you found key patterns and trends after researching your target audience, modify what you have been doing accordingly.
You could start by adjusting your advertising budget and spending more on social media platforms that your buyer persona prefers. Another great marketing tactic is to include buzzwords that your buyer persona uses in promotional content. Appeal to your audience emotionally by creating content that aligns with their values or motivations.
Finally, you now know your customer, and what they want. Using what you have learned, all there is left to do is to create relevant content that resonates with your viewers.
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