Creating a marketing buyer persona hones your strategy so it effectively targets the right prospective customers. But where do you begin?
I’ll walk you through how to get started!
What is a marketing buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a research-based representation of the ideal buyer for a company, created in the form of a fictional person. They embody the behavioral characteristics of someone who needs your brand’s product or service.
Marketing personas incorporate information on a buyer’s demographics, location, interests, etc. They also outline the consumer behavior of a company’s ideal buyer. Personas look at who a company’s ideal buyers are, what those buyers want to buy, and how those buyers think. They help marketers understand their current and prospective customers better by examining why consumers make the buying decisions that they do.
Why is it important for marketing?
Having an established buyer persona is an important part of an effective marketing campaign. It defines the type of customer a brand is targeting, by looking at their needs, wants, and concerns, as well as their purchasing behavior. Marketers use buyer personas to narrow their focus on attracting customers who meet their buyer criteria.
Companies that know their ideal customers have a huge marketing advantage, because, for one, they can tailor content to their customers’ specific interests. Having relevant, useful content personalized for an ideal consumer also helps companies with search engine rankings. A well-researched and defined buyer persona strengthens a brand’s content marketing campaigns and its overall marketing strategy.
Buyer personas can help marketers determine:
- The type of content to produce.
- The best content topics to focus on.
- The tone and style of the content.
- How to deliver and promote the content.
- Where consumers get info from (and where to host and promote your content).
- How do you create a buyer persona?
How do you create a buyer persona for marketing?
The best buyer personas based on a collection of data from surveys, interviews, and market research. When examining individuals, look at customers, prospects, and other consumers who could align with your ideal buyer.
Methods:
- Get feedback from your sales and customer success teams on the kind of buyer they have had the most success with.
- Add forms to your website that include fields for important buyer persona information to gather more information about visitors and leads.
- Look at contact database and nurture stream to identify content consumption decisions and behaviors and which types of content create leads.
- Create surveys for current and prospective customers.
- Conduct interviews with customer/prospect/potential target audience about their view of your product, and discover the interests and needs that your product meets.
- Pull data about your customers from social media.
What information should be collected for a marketing buyer persona?
When creating a specific marketing buyer persona — and you’ll be creating more than one — you need to collect as much data as possible that relates to how you can better target that buyer. Here’s some of the information you should collect in order to create a complete and accurate persona:
Background: Include information on location, age, gender, family, education, and obvious personality traits.
Job: Job title, their career path, and their current responsibilities.
Goals: What goals is this person actively pursuing in their role?
Challenges: What stands in the way of them achieving their goals? What makes their job harder?
Where our company fits in: How can our company help this person achieve their goals and overcome challenges?
Communication preferences: Find out their preferred content medium, main sources of information, and preferred system of receiving information.
Quotes: In interviews and surveys, keep a record of quotes from individuals who fit this buyer persona.
Objections: Keep a record of common objects this buyer persona would make during the purchasing process.
Role in sales process: Is this person the decision maker when it comes to purchasing your product or service, or are they a champion, driving the decision making process?
Messaging: How your product or service is best described to this person.
By following these basic first steps toward creating buyer personas, you are well on your way to a more efficient and effective marketing strategy!
