Quirky Quin. Studious Steve. Beauty Beth. These three completely different characters all have one thing in common: your business. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. Backed up by data and research, these personas are defined by a mixture of attributes:
- Background and demographic
- Location
- Job/career path
- Shopping habits
- Goals
- Challenges
- How your business helps solve their problems
- Social media networks/technology
- Hobbies
Do you know who your buyer personas are? If so, how much do you actually know about them? Having a deep understanding of your target customers is crucial for driving sales, content creation, product development, and attracting qualified prospects.
Buyer personas are important because the better your content, the easier it is to build a community of like-minded people who will support your brand for the long haul. Without knowing who your ideal customers are, it’s pretty difficult to create an effective marketing strategy to attract more of them.
So, how do you identify these people?
How to Create Your Buyer Personas
You can develop your personas through interviews, surveys, and research with customers, prospects, and people who might align with your target audience. You can gather this information by reviewing your contacts database; you might discover a few trends about how people find and interact with your business.
Form fields on your website are another great way to capture persona information from your target customers. If all of your personas are based on hobbies and interests, ask people how they enjoy their free time.
Talk with your sales team and get some feedback on leads they work with often as well. You might notice some common characteristics between the different types of customers you have.
Once you’ve combed through all of your research, you’ll have quite a bit of data to work with. Before diving into all of your numbers, download our free persona template. This tool will help you map out your customers and organize all of your information.
Download your How to Create Buyer Personas E-Book!
Once you’ve collected all of your responses and organized the data, gather your team to consolidate and categorize your personas. List out the pain points your customers identified, their background information, etc. You can refine all of the details later on, but right now you’re just going to focus on the bigger picture.
During this stage, you’ll probably notice a few common themes in people’s answers. You may even learn about challenges you hadn’t considered before. Now, it’s time to map it out.
First things first, figure out how many personas you want to create. Your team and your business goals should properly align with this number; 3–5 personas is a great range to start with. Any more than that and you’re probably going a bit overboard. Next step is identifying your audience.
- Give each persona a relevant name
E.g., Quirky Quin, Studious Steve, etc.
- Age
Include a range
- Gender
Include if applicable
- Occupation
Include if applicable
- Social channels
Figure out where they spend most of their time online
- Pain points
Narrow down your list of pain points to the 3 most popular themes if possible
- How your business solves their problems
Directly address the main paint points you’ve outlined and how your business addresses and solves them
Once you’re finished, you should have a defined group of buyer personas to work with. After creating these, send them to people within your company for feedback from different areas of the business: sales, content creation, product development, etc.
You can also use the information you’ve gathered for each persona to craft a simple story that captures who your target customer is. This can really help bring your personas to life and make them stick.
How to Use your New Buyer Personas
Now that you’ve got your personas down, it’s time to put them to good use. Use empathy in your content strategy — whether it’s inspirational, entertaining, or educational, make sure your content is giving your target customers something they need or want.
And of course, you have to measure your success. Make sure you’re tracking the correct metrics for your content strategy to see if it’s actually working.
If this seems like a lot to take on, call in some reinforcements. Marketing agencies like Oh, Hello Branding Group are not only experts creating buyer personas, but also so much more. Contact us to see how we can help your business thrive!
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