When marketing your business, it's extremely important to know who your audience is. You can't use the same messaging for every demographic, so understanding who is actually buying your product is essential to a successful marketing strategy.
The best way to find out is by creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a representation of who your target audience is. And you want to determine this with real-world data that you pull from your CRM and industry information.
So how do you gather this information? And how do you put it into a nice little fictional representation of who your buyer actually is?
Let's take a look.
What information do you need for a buyer persona?
You want to start with basic demographics. What age or generation of people are buying your product/service? Are they married? What is their annual household income? Do they have kids? Are they male or female? What part of town do they live in (city, suburbs, etc.)? What is their level of education? What path did their career take? How did they get where they are now?
It's important to be as specific as possible. You want your buyer persona to accurately represent your customers.
Dive deeper into certain demographics to get even more information. To whom do they report to at their company? What is their job title? What level are they at in their company? What is the company size? This information is especially pertinent for B2B companies who are targeting business owners and decision makers.
Furthermore, determine the pain points that make them buy from you for a solution. What is their motivation? Are they driven more by value or convenience, etc.?
Where do you get this information?
Although some businesses may make this information up out of thin air, it's important to know that approach is not going to help you determine your true target audience. Instead, you need to actually pay attention to your customers, your analytics, and the data you have on hand to put together your buyer persona.
Take a look at your website's analytics to see what keywords people are searching to get to your website. You can actually tell a lot about what your audience is looking for based on the search terms they're using. For example, if you often see the words "sale" or "discount" alongside your keyword, it's easy to glean that a big motivator for your audience is value and price. They want discounts, and this is valuable information to know. This means that one of the best ways to generate new leads and customer opportunities is by offering coupons or discount codes for first-time buyers.
You also want to check out your social media insights. For example, Facebook Insights has an entire section all about the people who like your page and their top-level demographics, so that you can see the age, gender, locations, and languages spoken by your fans, followers, and people your posts have reached.
One of the best ways to get the most specific information is by sending out a customer survey to learn more about your audience directly from the horse's mouth. Put together a 5-minute survey that asks about basic demographics, motivations, interests, shopping behaviors, etc. (be sure to include ranges in multiple choice, rather than asking for specifics to make your audience more comfortable answering).
How can your buyer persona be used in marketing?
If you know exactly who your audience is, it makes it much easier to cater your marketing and messaging efforts to those people. If you're targeting moms, you're not going to create content about staying up late playing video games all night, every night, because no mom has time for that!
So, being able to personalize your content and really speak directly to your audience is the perfect way to create strong relationships with your customers and build up brand loyalty.
Not only that, but having a well-developed buyer persona(s) can also help with your digital ad targeting. Because you have detailed information about who your audience is, and because digital ad platforms allow you to target based on many specific identifiers, you're able to display ads right in front of the people who are buying your stuff.
If you have more than one buyer persona (for example, different locations for your different store locations), you can even segment those audiences out in your CRM or email marketing platform so you can create different email marketing messaging targeted for one store or location over another.
How do you create your buyer persona?
So, you know what information you need, you know where to find it, and you know how to use it. Now it's time to actually create a buyer persona.
It's almost as easy as filling out a personality quiz. Give each persona a name to represent them, then write down everything you know about that character. Their age, gender, job information, income, etc. Everything we covered previously. That's all pertinent to your persona.
If you have more than one target audience, you'll need to create multiple personas.
Fill in basic demographic data. Add any knowledge you have about their interests and shopping behaviors. Finally, identify their motivations and values when it comes to buying things for themselves and their families.
Develop your basic marketing messaging that will work for that audience so you can flesh it out later when working on your marketing strategy.
Once you have all of your personas written down in front of your sales and marketing teams, you're ready to get started.
At Connection Model, we want to help your business succeed. Contact us to learn more about the importance of buyer personas, how your business can leverage this powerful tool, and create content catered directly to your audience.
Written By: David Carpenter
