What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional member of your target audience that your sales and marketing teams create – through research – to build their campaigns around. If you have multiple target audiences, you’ll likely create several buyer personas to deliver the personalized marketing that buyers have come to expect.
Why are buyer personas important?
Suppose you’ve ever been on the receiving end of a “To Whom It May Concern” email or even a generic piece of advertising from a brand you’ve supported before. In that case, you understand the importance of buyer personas.
Your audience wants to feel like they have a relationship with you. And the best way to do that is to understand the basic human need to be seen and heard. When you create a buyer persona – the more specific, the better – you can build brilliant marketing campaigns and generate personalized content that makes your brand message resonate with your buyers and potential buyers.
It sounds counterintuitive, but specificity is universal. When you attempt to reach everyone with your marketing, you only succeed in reaching no one. Your buyer personas will give you insight into who exactly is purchasing your product and how to make your message resonate with more of them.
How do you create a buyer persona?
Your research into your target audience informs your buyer personas. You can have fun and be creative with this, but don’t forget to be as specific as possible!
1. Research your audience thoroughly.
You should learn everything you can about your audience, including:
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Behaviors
- Buying habits
- Pain points
- Goals and objectives
- Preferred marketing channels
- Communication style
2. Develop your buyer personas.
Once you’ve gathered your research, simply review the raw data and divide your customers into segments. From there, create detailed persona profiles, including how your product or service can help them. Give each one a name and backstory. And finally, validate your personas. Ask for feedback from your sales, marketing, and other customer-facing teams.
3. Refine your personas over time.
As you gather more information (and more customers!), continue to adapt to what the data is showing you.
Should you speak with current customers when developing buyer personas?
Yes! Surveys and interviews are an incredibly important part of the buyer persona creation process. Just make sure you’re asking your customers the right things so that you get the information you need.
- What does this person want or need that my brand can provide? Make sure you’re looking at both their short-term needs and long-term goals.
- What challenges/problems in the person’s life is your product hopefully solving? Having a cool vibe is great, but your customers want to know what you’re actually going to do for them. (Looking at you, WeWork.) How does your product serve your customers?
- What is most important in your buyer’s life, and how can you help them get more of it? Every person will have a different answer, and you should be able to figure out exactly how your product or service can help address that specific issue.
- What about your product – or another product in your category – gets your interviewee’s attention? Find out what exactly about your messaging resonated with your buyer.
- If this person is already a customer, what do they like about your product? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Find out what’s already working for your buyer.
- What about your product does not meet their needs? There’s always room for improvement. It’s just as important to find out what’s not working in order to get better.
How do you use buyer personas?
You should be considering your buyer personas with every piece of content you create! Some examples:
Your website: Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking for a rebrand, your buyer persona should be top of mind. When you craft your buyer persona, you discuss how your product or service helps this person. Pull language directly from those profiles and add them to your website content!
Your blog content: Your blog posts will resonate when they feel as though they are being written with one specific person in mind. If that person has unique pain points, questions, and writing styles, they’ll respond better. Imagine your buyer persona as your best friend and write your blog content just for them!
Your video content: Yes, video content is expensive, but you can make sure you’re getting your money’s worth when you’re creating video content with your buyer persona in mind. Their goals, their challenges, and how your product or service addresses them could all serve as great pieces of video content. Make sure you’re consulting your persona in every aspect of the production, even the background music!
Incorporate Buyer Personas into Your Content
Whether you need help crafting buyer personas or want to generate personalized marketing content for your personas at scale, ClearVoice has you covered. Reach your target audience quickly and effectively with ClearVoice as your content marketing partner. Talk to a content specialist today to get started!
