How and why you need to create buyer personas How and Why You Need to Create Buyer Personas

The best and most effective marketing campaigns aren’t based around the guesswork. Creating engaging content, creative and messaging that captures the attention of your audience is underpinned by understanding who it is you want to talk to and what makes them tick. Enter, the buyer persona!

What is a buyer persona?

 To put it simply, a buyer persona is a built-up profile that best represents your ideal target customer. By creating these personas, you as a marketer will gain a more in-depth understanding of your audience and how you can reach out to them in a considered way. Let’s face it, if you don’t know what your audience wants, needs and likes, how will you ever know how to create marketing campaigns and content to attract and engage them?

Your buyer personas are effectively a detailed description of your desired customer. These profiles will be based on research that includes information like:

  • Where they live
  • Job role
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Salary
  • Interests and hobbies
  • What magazines they read

 And so on. All of this information is vital to understanding your customer and ultimately, how best to speak to them from a marketing perspective. Not only this, but creating buyer personas will also allow you to get more of a feel for the challenges they face, the objections they may throw at you, and how to counteract these.

 Why do they matter?

 Really, how can you expect any marketing initiative to work if you have no idea about whom it is you’re looking to engage with? Without this vital information, any content, campaigns or other tactics will likely fall flat before you’ve even started, attracting the wrong audience (if any at all) and leaving you having wasted a tonne of time and potentially money on your marketing activity.

Buyer personas will help you get a grip on your customers and prospects motivations, what influences them, and how they make purchasing decisions. Once these questions have been answered, you can tailor your content to fit. If what you’re saying resonates, people are far more likely to buy from you.

 Creating personas

 Make a start by thinking of your two ideal customers – type a and type b.

The best buyer personas are structured from insight, personal data (from your database, etc.) and market research. If you need to create more, do so at a later date.

Look closely at key identifiers like location, age, income, motivations, objections and concerns. You can gather the data you need from a variety of sources, including your own records, conversations you’ve had previously with customers, looking at your website analytics and the demographics and engagement you’ve received on your social media platforms.

 You could also try:

  • Web forms – gather essential personal information such as demographic and location without being too intrusive on your websites contact forms, or offer free PDF downloads or white papers in exchange for a customer or prospects details.
  • Focus groups – invite a selection of your existing customers to a focus group (chuck a free breakfast or afternoon tea in for good measure and to say thank you for their time!) and ask them questions about their likes, dislikes, needs and wants.
  • Questionnaires – send out a simple questionnaire form (you could use a platform like Survey Monkey or Google Forms) to your clients asking them for feedback to help you with your future marketing campaigns.

Unsure what questions to ask? Here are a few examples to help you on your way:

  • What are the biggest challenges you face in the workplace?
  • What are your personal and career ambitions?
  • Which social platforms do you use?
  • Where do you go to find information relative to your industry?
  • How do you prefer to receive communications?

How do you use personas to influence your marketing efforts?

 Creating buyer personas gives you the ability to craft tailored, relevant creative and content that speaks to your ideal customers, rather than everyone! Segmenting your message will pay dividends, and factually, the more targeted you can be with any of your marketing efforts, the more success you’re likely to see.

If you need some help developing a creative, well thought out marketing campaign that attracts precisely the right audience, talk to our team today and let us help you on your way to engaging with the clients you’ve always dreamed of.

Subscribe for Email Updates

Sign up to our newsletter for all the latest tips on brand, social and Facebook ads!

Marketing by