Digital marketing is most effective when highly targeted to the correct audience. This takes tons of research and top algorithms to understand. To accurately find a target audience for your business, one of the essential steps to take is to create a buyer’s persona. Discover how to create a buyer’s persona for your business and delve into the why behind the process.
Buyer’s Persona: What it is
A buyer’s persona is a model of the person believed to purchase your products or services. A buyer’s persona creates a full model of potential and likely customer from who they are to why they would buy from you.
Tony Zambito, the idea originator, created the buyer’s persona concept. He defines a buyer’s persona as:
“Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. (Today, I now include where they buy as well as when buyers decide to buy.)” – Tony Zambito
This is the definition generally accepted in the digital marketing industry. The key takeaways are that a buyer’s persona provides a solid understanding of:
- Who buyers are
- What they are trying to do
- How they think
- How they buy
- Why they buy
- Where they buy
- When they buy
Why Your Business Needs To Create One
Creating a buyer’s persona is vital to marketing a product or service in the digital era where just about every market is saturated. Before the creation of the buyer’s persona concept, there was very little data-driven research on how to market or sell products.
Finding out who is buying helps to decipher who will buy in the future. This is something businesses tried guessing for a long time. The buyer’s persona concept provided a structured and solidified way to achieve this accurately. Your business needs to create a buyer’s persona in order to better understand your customer and learn how, when, where, why, and whom to target for increased sales.
A Look at Negative Buyer’s Persona
Contrasting a buyer’s persona is the negative buyer’s persona—a creation growing in popularity with online businesses. A negative buyer’s persona is the persona of the person who will not buy your products or services. Creating a negative buyer’s persona provides your company with a complete outline of who and who not to market to.
Ad spend waste on people who will never become conversions is a common issue in the digital era. Creating a negative persona allows businesses to understand how not to and who not to market their products to.
Utilization Methods for Buyer’s Personas
The most significant part of creating a buyer’s persona is figuring out a potential customer’s mindset and how you can reach them online. Gaining an in-depth understanding of your customer’s goals is priceless. This understanding informs how you can aid in the accomplishment of these goals.
When creating a buyer’s persona, focus on relevant details and ignore things that aren’t prevalent to your buyer. For example, if you sell running shoes, understanding that your buyers enjoy vanilla ice cream will not help you market to them. However, understanding that they tend to purchase new running shoes two months before a big race is essential.
You learn how to better market to your highest-conversion-likely audience segment by creating a buyer’s persona for your business. You can better construct your digital marketing campaigns and understand when and where to increase or decrease ad spend. You also gain a better understanding of what types of messaging your potential customers do and do not respond well to.
Steps To Creating a Buyer’s Persona for Your Company
Understanding the benefits that a buyer’s persona brings to your business is a great start. Discover the steps to creating one to get started on yours.
Step One
Step one is to survey your customers. Survey those who visit your site, make purchases, cancel services, or are anywhere along the purchase process. Ask your customers about their experience and about themselves. Finding out who they are and what they are and aren’t responding to is essential when it comes to developing your buyer’s persona.
Step Two
Decipher what needs the customer has. Analyze the data you have on existing customers and understand the driving need that causes them to buy your products or services. It’s also beneficial to know how your products or services meet that driving need.
Step Three
Identify background, demographics, interests, and other identifiers. Collect this through existing data and the surveys you administer to customers. Discovering these requires some data analysis.
Step Four
Identify the goals, challenges, and obstacles of your buyer. For example, explore a buyer persona for a search engine optimization company. A business selling handmade, artisanal candles is a potential conversion. This candle shop is selling a product with 20 direct competitors selling nearly the same products. They need to find a way to stand out, but running a small business takes time and effort. Small business owners don’t always have the time or resources to increase their organic website rankings. The need, or obstacle, is a low SEO ranking with no time to fix it. The business owner needs someone to handle SEO for them at an affordable rate. Logical Position’s team of SEO experts fills this need. Thus, part of our buyer’s persona is business owners who are short on time and need higher rankings on Google and other popular search engines.
Step Five
Create persona-specific messaging. Once you develop a persona, you need to find out how to communicate with that persona to produce results. Analyze your existing data and create actionable items that address the base need of that customer. Once you complete this, think about how you can get them, and others like them, to buy.
Common Challenges During the Process
Creating a buyer’s persona is no easy task. There are a few common challenges many companies face when creating their own, including:
- Focusing too closely on one single type of persona
- Hyper focusing on one customer or group of customers
- Looking at only broad or specific data, instead of getting a full picture
- Losing sight of the humanity of your buyer
Remember, your buyer’s persona is supposed to reflect a real, actual person’s personality and life. Consider each customer’s humanity and uniqueness while looking at them from a broad yet realistic lens.
Key Takeaways with Buyer’s Persona Creation
Creating a buyer’s persona for your business can get intricate and overwhelming, especially for broader product or service offerings. Keep these critical takeaways in mind to avoid data fatigue and frustration when creating a buyer’s persona for your business.
- Creating a highly accurate buyer’s persona requires discipline and effort, but it is well worth your time and consideration.
- Remember, your buyers are all individual people with unique personalities. Even though they fit into your generalization, there will be some variance, so don’t hyper-focus too much or you may lose out on potential customers!
- When in doubt, consult with a professional digital marketing agency. Experts have plenty of information to help you create an accurate buyer’s persona for your business.
Researching how to create a buyer’s persona for your business is beneficial in creating a successful digital marketing plan. Logical Position offers a multitude of digital marketing services provided by a dedicated team of industry experts. We can help provide data to guide your buyer’s persona and provide expertise on your digital marketing campaigns. Contact us today for a free consultation and more information. As a Google Adwords company and Facebook Premier Partner, we have industry insider information to help your company stand out through our conversion-driven approach.
