Buyer Persona is widely known by different names such as audience persona, marketing persona, or customer persona. This is a technique that helps companies to develop the content of a much higher quality. In this way, they can target their ideal customers in the best way possible. No matter whether you are a social media marketer or utilize any other source for your marketing purposes, it is extremely easy and widely happens that you may get lost in the tracking details and paths of your campaigns and latest engagement rates. A buyer persona is a factor that will allow you while making you able to keep the requirements, desires, and expectations of your customers as your top property, even your own requirements and needs will come below in the priority list.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona consists of a full detailed description of your target audience while putting light on every aspect of it. Although a company’s target audience or customer is represented in a buyer persona with complete details, this is not an actual customer but is a conceptual person who has all the characteristics of your target customers.
To complete the buyer persona, you will start by giving a name to your persona and will move forward by including demographic details, likes, dislikes, behavior, and all other business-related traits. By focusing on these details, you will be able to understand the patterns, goals, and major points of your customers. You will be able to understand the way a customer thinks and make purchases.
For better representation of your buyer persona, you can give them a face using stock photography or any other technique. Because of the extreme importance of a buyer persona to attract your target audience, some companies have even developed special cardboard cutouts in their office or business firm.
In this way, their customers can be depicted and represented in a much better and realistic way. The main idea of doing all this is to think about and talk with your customers in a much focused manner. This helps you create a specially crafted message that will be used for marketing to your target audiences.
While designing a buyer persona, you should keep this fact in mind that it will include all minor to major aspects of your customer whether it is about product development or promoting your products through social media or any other marketing platform that you use.
There may come a need of creating many buyer personas because different groups of people buy your products because of different reasons and you have to take a look at all of your customers’ thinking. There are possibilities that you may don’t know or think about each of your customers individually, but you have the option to create a buyer persona for each group of people and learn about their personality and characteristics.
How to Develop a Buyer Persona for your Company?
Creating a buyer persona is not a difficult job but it can become difficult if you don’t know the right way to do it. This section will go through all the major steps that can lead you to create a successful buyer persona. One thing that should be kept in mind is that never move forward in a hurry as one skipped step can ruin all of your efforts. The procedure goes on with following phases:
- Do a Comprehensive Buyers Research
- Identify the Pain Points of your Customers
- Identify your Customers Goals and Objectives
- Now Think about Solutions to help your Customers
- Finally, Create your Buyer Persona
Do a Comprehensive Buyers Research:
The first rule of creating an effective buyer persona is that it should not only be based on your instincts but you should use real-world statistics and data. This is just a simple description that requires a lot of research work. In order to do thorough research of your audience, below is the detailed guide that will allow you to get the job done in the easiest way.
Start by collecting data from your existing users and social media audiences that read your posts more often. Focus on minor to major details such as:
- Audiences’ Age
- Location
- Language
- Purchasing Power
- Spending Patterns and Standards
- Likes and Dislikes
- Challenges
- Life’s Stage
If it is a business-to-business service or B2B company, it is highly recommended to consider a few other factors as well such as the size of the organization or business and who is responsible for making purchasing decisions. You can collect all these statistics and data from different ways such as your users’ database, Social Media Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, Google Analytics, etc.
Once you have made a major part of your research, now it’s time to see what are the most efficient and right channels to reach your potential target audiences. You can start by knowing where your customers spend most of their time nowadays and which platform is the most favorite. This is not a difficult task as there are plenty of tools that can help you out. Some of the best tools for this purpose include Keyhole.co, Google Analytics, Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch.
After all this research, look for the competition and see what they have done to reach their target audiences. Follow some of the customers’ survey tips that have already been done by your competitors. You can get help from search streams and other tools such as Buzzsumo.
Identify the Pain Points of your Customers:
One of the most important things that can make a business successful and can also lead it to destruction is the obstacles that customers face while achieving their goals. You should focus on the problems and concerns that customers face and what are the factors that are stopping them from succeeding. One of the best and most effective ways to identify these problems is to get engaged with the customers, read their comments, analyze feedback, and see what customers are talking about on social media platforms.
Implementing your search streams and monitoring your product, brand, company, and your competitor’s credentials will provide you with a real-time view of what people think and say about you on different online platforms. You will be able to get an idea of what things are liked by the customers and what aspects of your business are not being appreciated.
You can get an idea by analyzing your customer support service and seeing what type of questions are most frequently asked. This will help you to know about the aspects in which customers are facing challenges. You can even use the actual quotes that are used while asking questions to the customer support, this will allow you to create your buyer persona in a better way.
Identify your Customers Goals and Objectives:
This is quite the opposite of the thing we have discussed in our last step. Where pain points are the problems that are stopping your customers from reaching their goals, goals or objectives are customer’s ideas and all the positive things that they want to reach or archive. Depending on the kind of services or products your business sells, these goals can be personal or professional or sometimes both as well. You have to analyze what things motivate your customers to shop from you and what they actually need from your company.
The goals can also become the solution that you have to offer but that’s not always the case. It’s more about getting to know and understanding your customers than trying to make more accurate comparisons with the customer’s goals with your product’s features or advantages.
Do keep this fact in mind that your buyer persona’s goals are extremely important even if these goals are not specifically related to the features and benefits of your products and services. Identifying the goals and objectives of your customers can help you in creating an efficient buyer persona more than anything else. This step will form the basics of your social media campaign and can track your tone or perspective on your marketing.
Social listing can also be a great way of collecting information to identify your customer’s goals and objectives. As we have mentioned above that your customer support can help you identify your customers’ pain points, the sales team of your company can be a great source to identify customers’ goals.
Your sales team is one of the only few sectors that talk directly to your customers who are using or thinking of buying your products and services. They also have clear ideas about what the outside people and audience like and what are the goals that they want to achieve through your products.
For better research, ask your sales team to get quotes from each of your customers in which they tell about their experience and expectations from the company. You can also ask your customers to suggest ways and tactics that a company should use to mitigate the objections and problems that customers usually face while shopping from you.
Now Think about Solutions to Help your Customers
Now that you understand your client’s weaknesses and goals, now it’s high time to paint a clear and well-crafted picture of how your company’s products and services can help them to have a perfect experience. As a major part of this important initiative, you have to stop thinking about your company’s brands and services in terms of features and go deeper to analyze the benefits that customers can get.
As marketers only think about the product’s features, getting out of this mindset could be a difficult job and this is actually the main reason why creating a buyer persona is important for a company. A buyer persona helps you and marketers to get out of the features mindset and focus on the development of your products from a buyer’s perspective.
A feature is just a characteristic or property of your products but benefits are of actual importance because this is what makes the life of your customers easy and comfortable. You should ask yourself a few questions about every pain point and goal of your costumes to get a better solution.
Your first question should be how you can help your customers? The answer to this question should be concluded in one simple sentence and include this sentence in the template of your buyer persona.
Your second question should be about the main and actual barriers to your audience’s buying and what is the best way to mitigate them? Once you have an answer to this question, you can think about where your followers stand on their shopping trip or what is their buying journey status? They could be researching at this time or may have enough information about your brand that they are going to make their first purchase.
Finally, Create your Buyer Persona:
Now you have everything required to create a perfect buyer persona. Gather all your research and look for the characteristics that are most common in your target audiences. By classifying and bundling these common characteristics, you will have a clear customer base for your buyer persona.
For example, we assume that you gather common characteristics from your research and find out that there is a large group of audiences that are of age 25, live in a small town, like to go camping, and have a bicycle. From all these characters, you can easily make a buyer persona that will work for you as a character you can relate to or talk to.
For deep analysis, give a name, a home location, a job position, and other descriptive characteristics to your buyer persona. It is essential to perform these steps so that your buyer persona can look like a real person who will buy from your company.
While giving details to your buyer persona, just keep this point in mind that you should give all those characteristics to your persona that you will need to see on a dating site about a person. You should give your buyer persona all those characteristics that you can learn by meeting a person at an airport or bus stop with just a short conversation. Remember to mention the pain points and goals of your customers as well.
According to your research, you will give your persona some characteristic that makes him a real person such as:
Do keep this fact in mind that the list of characteristics is not like a single person but it represents a complete part or group of your customers’ base and the persona is their realistic description. It is not possible that each person in a specific group has all the mentioned characteristics and meets all the requirements.
Your persona will represent the group as a whole and will allow you to think and talk to them as a real person instead of just concluding data and making assumptions using simple figures or statistics.
Once you have prepared your buyer personas completely, it is highly recommended to tell yourself by describing every persona in terms of who they are and what they want to achieve. This factor will not only allow you to analyze them in a better way but will also help you in finding solutions. You will be able to analyze how your company’s products and services can help your audiences while making their life a bit better.
How does your company use/utilize the buyer persona?
Using your buyer persona in the most effective way is essential to get the most efficient result from your business and your audiences. There are many minor details and ways of using the buyer persona in your company but there are three major steps to get things done in the best and most effective way.
- Redesign your Company’s Work with Customer’s Point of View
- Create your Social Media Advertisement More Efficiently
- Use Buyers Persona Spring to Boost your Return On Investment (ROI)
- Redesign your Company’s Work with Customer’s Point of View:
By most of the marketers in the business world, corporate language and well-known buzzwords are used to attract their audience but in reality, they may not be as effective as they seem because they don’t really make sense for many of your target customers. A buyer persona can help you in an efficient way to not focus on these common techniques and think about the actual real humans who are engaged with your content and read your social media posts and blogs.
Buyer persons are solely designed and implemented so that companies can focus on pleasing their precious customers and this can only be done by considering the customer’s preferences rather than your own. Whenever you make a decision to change or implement a new social media or any general marketing strategy, keeping your buyer persona in front of you will bring huge benefits.
Your new marketing campaigns should have factors and characteristics that meet the needs, goals, and requirements of at least your one customer and if it is not the case, no matter how interesting, complete, and effective your plan may seem, it is extremely important to reconsider your working plan and update it because you have a good solid reason for that.
Develop your social media strategy while keeping the needs of your customer in your mind. Your main aim should be to design a strategy that can fulfill the goals and desires of your customers. If you move forward with this thinking, you will not only be able to build relationships with your potential target audience but the customers will be loyal to your company as well.
- Create your Social Media Advertisement More Efficiently:
Social media is one of the best advertising platforms as it offers a wide range of detailed targeting options. After you have completely created your buyers’ persons and have understood all the necessary things about your customers, you can easily create and design your social media advertising in a way that they can directly talk to your target customers.
Once you have designed such types of social media ads, it’s time you use the power of social media targeting in the most efficient way so that your advertisements can go right in front of your customers. If you have many buyers’ personas, you have the option to create different types of ads and content for each specific type of buyer personas. This factor will not only increase the conversion rate of your posts and ads but will surely improve your social media marketing campaigns in many ways.
- Use Buyers Persona Spring to Boost your Return On Investment (ROI):
Buyer Persona Spring is a well-designed model that is used to connect your designed buyer persona with your business objectives and goals. This model was created by a highly skilled and experienced group of experts known as Tahir Rashid, Aleksej Heinze, and Gordon Fletcher. You may be confused about why this model is named “spring”, this is simply because this model consists of three different loops, Content, Channels, Data.
In the first loop, you will decide about the kind of content that will take your voice to your target customers or buyer persona. In the second loop, you will find out the social media platforms that are most favorite and widely used by your buyer persona. In the final loop, data will be analyzed.
We all know that good data allow companies to monitor their efforts, report their success or failures, and review their social media strategy to analyze whether it is working efficiently or needs updates. You are required to perform four actions in each loop mentioned above, the actions are planning, action, observation, and reflection.
