What Exactly is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on market research and live data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona, the more detailed you are, the better! It is important to consider customer demographics (such as age, gender, marital status, education) & behavior patterns (i.e.- trends a consumer may display when making purchasing decisions) focusing on how these line up with your company’s goals & motivations. Doing so, helps tailor your marketing approach with each unique business!
Why Is It Important to My Business?
Buyer personas help businesses understand & relate to their customers. This is a helpful way to ensure you do your very best job at serving them! Identifying your client’s needs and interests is a fundamental step of business development. After all, if you don’t know who you’re aiming your efforts at, how are you going to sell your products or services?
Knowing pertinent info like their age, gender & goals help you organize your approach. Mark, a 30 year old, single male, focused on increasing his social presence would require different marketing efforts than Helen, a 65 year old, female business owner looking to sell cat clothes.
Building a detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time and efforts. Mark and Helen have different long term goals. They are also in different age groups which play a factor in where they spend their time and what kind of advertising they’d prefer. Print or digital? Many of our clients prefer and still excel in newspaper and magazine ads, while others are all digital. Really understanding where the customer spends their time helps you to choose which outlets to use when marketing your company.
Will we be doing all digital advertising (social media, email campaigns, radio ads, ecommerce sites)? OR are they more focused on print advertisement (newspaper and magazine ads, flyers, posters, print collateral)? OR does their budget allow them to test out the waters in both digital and print platforms to see where they get the most traffic? There are so many questions to consider when honing in and marketing for individual clients, and knowing the “places” those ideal clients hang out just makes that easier.
What to Consider When Creating Your Company’s Buyer Persona
We already know that it is important to consider things like consumer demographics, behavioral patterns, motivations, and goals. But let’s get a little bit more specific… Dig a little deeper if you will. Really take time to see who your customer is and what makes them tick!
- How old are they?
- What is their gender?
- Married, Single, “It’s complicated”?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do?
- What are their main goals?
- What are their biggest obstacles?
- What motivates them?
- What websites do they visit?
- Are they active on social media?
Taking the time to establish this will make your time more beneficial in the long run. You’ll have a clear idea of your consumers needs and their buying patterns. No more wasted time redoing work or playing catch up! Really learning and understanding their patterns and habits will help you mold your sales process in accordance with their decision-making habits. A little bit more time and effort put forth up front will go a long way in the long run! It will help drive sales, create suitable content & push out products that fall in line with the consumers overall vision and goals. This type of prior research helps switch your mindset from “what you do” to “what your customer needs!”
Want to Create Your Own Buyer Persona?
Download our Buyer Persona template to create your own!
