When creating and marketing your business you need to know the answer to one critical question: Who are your customers and how can you help them
If you create a product or a service but you don’t know who’s the person you are creating it for, chances are you won’t have a clear target.
Result? You won’t be able to market your product correctly and it won’t sell. Knowing first hand to whom you are selling, what their needs and characteristics are, is key to reach the right target.
A Buyer Persona(BP) is a semi-fictional character you create that represents your ideal customer – the person you want to sell to. Your BP has a certain problem and a need that has to be met, and you’re the one offering the solution.
When working in Digital Marketing, your target spectrum is much narrower than in traditional marketing, and focusing on a BP helps you make it less abstract and more real.
Your communication becomes more personal and humanized, and your marketing gets stronger and more cost-effective. Giving your customer a name and an I.D. helps you meet their needs better and faster.
Create Your Buyer Persona
Grab a paper or open a new Word document and describe who your Buyer Persona is.
Despite giving him/her a name, an age, a location, an occupation, and an annual income– you can even go deeper and describe their relationship status and kids – figure out their:
- Goals: What does your persona want to accomplish?
- Problems: Where does your persona need help? What are their greatest handicaps?
- Obstacles: What’s the thing that’s stopping your persona from going further and achieving their goals?
- Questions: What would your persona ask if they wanted to take the next step?
- Keywords and phrases: Research for keywords and phrases your persona would search for when looking for help. What would catch their attention when searching for information?
- Where they look for help: It could be social media, traditional media, or other websites. Find out where your persona searches for information, which channels they opt for most.
A Buyer Persona is a description of your ideal customer.
After brainstorming all the topics bellow, you can create your Buyer Persona I.D, with their most important features. It should look something like this:
Tricks to Developing a Buyer Persona
It’s not always easy to come up with your ideal customer profile – you probably won’t get it right at first. But there are a few tricks you can rely on to make the process more intuitive:
- Look at your own characteristics and needs. Chances have you created a product that helps serve you, so designing a BP similar to yourself can help you better define it.
- Think of WHY you created business. What was the core frustration that led to the idea, to fix a certain problem? Understand who the person with that problem is and describe them.
- Think of someone you know who’d make the perfect buyer for your product or service.
- Gather market information from other websites: Facebook Groups, Quora.com, Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, Youtube Analytics, etc. Searching for demographic data and potential buyer’s profiles will help you understand who your BP is.
Hubspot created a step by step guide that helps you build your personalized buyer persona easily. It’s called MakeMyPersona.
How Your Buyer Persona Can Help
They help you build a storyline: a customer goes through different points of decision making. Having a persona in mind helps you determine what that person will think and need at a specific point, enabling you to build a storyline across the buying process.
They help you create adequate content: When you know who you’re creating for and what that person needs, it becomes easy to determine what kind of content is important for you to create. You know what topics are a priority to your persona.
They serve as a constant reference: Your business doesn’t end when you have your final product – it’s a constant and ongoing development.
A BP will serve as a tool to help you stay in line when it comes to new marketing developments for the segment your persona represents. It is a foundation for your strategy and a constant reminder of your customer’s motivation to buy.
Test your Buyer Persona with feedback and make arrangements as your audience grows and you get to know your customers better!