Imagine this persona: Nicole is 30 years old, she is from Vienna, married with 2 kids, loves pets and runs her own online designer boutique. She is passionate about latest trends in fashion and wants to grab the international market within the next three years.
Bur this Nicole isn’t a real person.
She is a just a persona, meaning she’s an imaginary representation of an ideal buyer.
So, why even need Nicole in the first place?
It’s because businesses and marketers often lose focus by trying to address a large group of people and too many different needs. As a result, they miss the mark completely. It’s like taking an aim at a flock of birds with one arrow.
What is a persona and what’s their role?
A buyer persona or avatar is a fictional character of your ideal customer that you draw based on market research and data about your existing clients.
Even though personas are fictional, they can bring valuable insight for your business. They can help you decide where to focus your time, money and guide product development.
A persona will let you fine-tune your marketing efforts as it can expose gaps or conflict in your marketing messages and help understand why some products sell better than others.
In a nutshell, well-defined buyer personas will help you build a better marketing plan.
Core Benefits Of Buyer Personas
Simplify Content Creation
In today’s noisy, content-fatigued marketplace, simply segmenting your audience by demographic attributes no longer cuts the mustard. That’s why 60-70% of content marketing goes unread.
Instead of grouping your audience in buckets, creating a persona can help you write to an individual. This makes your contents less general and vague.
Here’s how Amex does it so brilliantly.
When writing to an individual (who could or might exist in real life) your content suddenly becomes more meaningful and personal with better use of words, phrases, examples etc.
This, in turn, helps you generate more leads. Your audience finds your content engaging, relevant and with a soul. The readers suddenly start to read instead of scanning.
Clear Understanding of Customer Needs
It’s easier to buy gifts for your mother or spouse than a stranger. right? It’s because you can visualize them in your head as you shop.
Customer personas do the same – help you visualize your customer and better understand their needs.
Informed Marketing And Sales Strategies
Personas can go further up the hierarchy than content marketing itself. It has the potential to shape your marketing and sales strategies.
Your sales team will do a better job when they can visualize a defined set of beliefs, characteristics, buying motivations in their customers.
Better Social Media Interactions
Your social media interactions and strategies come alive when you have your buyer persona in front of you. As soon as personas enter the picture, you have a much better idea of who you are addressing.
This can completely transform your brand’s image, to one that your audience loves.
Enhances Product Development
Success in business needs innovation and development. Unfortunately, this is not possible when you do not know what your customers want or need. Personas can greatly help in developing products that resonate within your market.
Helps Team Integrate and Focus
Last but not the least, a buyer persona will help you put your team on the same page.
Instead of each individual having their unique view of the target market, your team gets together and sketches the avatar. They come in with different views and after all the debate ends with the same view of who the customer is.
How To Create Your Business Persona
To create your own buyer persona or personas, first, you need to gather intel.
Who are your best customers? What’s your target group?
Below are the 5 best ways to gather information for your buyer persona.
Customer Data
Look at real data from current customers and interview them. Check with your customer service and sales team, they have heaps of data you can sift through.
You can also pull insightful audience reports from Google Analytics.
Image source: Online Behavior
Once you have your initial data, then your next step should be to conduct surveys. You can do this using various tools like Survey Monkey or Qualaroo. Set up a survey pop up on your website to get more data.
Competitor Data
If you are a start up or feel like you haven’t got enough customers for survey, then this is one way to get intelligence to create your persona.
You can use tools like SEMRush or BuzzSumo to spy on your competitors.
You can also take a look at their social media followers. This will help you scoop on your competitor’s audience and create a better picture of your ideal persona.
Social Media
Use social media to zoom in on your audience. Check out their profiles and see what are their interests or who they follow.
Always make sure to check your own social media primary analytics. Even better, if you dig deep with tools like Followerwonk.
Find Out Where Your Customers Are Hanging Out
Step into your customers’ shoes and find out where your customers spend time. I’m talking forums, events, organizations and even Youtube videos they watch and make comments.
By doing this you will not only find out more about their interest, hobbies but also other important attributes like attitude to life and their vocabulary. Remember, you need to speak their lingo.
18 Questions That You Need To Ask When Creating Your Persona
Before you gather around to sketch your brand new ideal persona, you will need to ask yourself and your team some questions.
These questions vary widely for different organizations. But there are some general ones that most businesses need to ask. And I’ve listed them below.
For convenience, I’ll assume that our persona is a ‘she’.
Personal Data
1. Is this person male or female? (We’ve already decided she’s a female)
2. How old is she?
3. Where is she from?
4. What’s her marital/ relationship status?
5. Does she have any kids? If so, how many?
6. What’s her educational background?
7. What’s her income?
8. How does she spend her day?
9. What are her hobbies?
10. Where does she work
11. What is her role?
12. What are her challenges?
13. What’s her ambition?
14. What’s her definition of success?
15. What social media does she use?
16. What would be her objections to my offer?
17. Where does she get her information from? Is she a reader, watcher or listener?
18. What’s her preference of communication? Phone, email, texting?
Once you have defined answers to the above questions, you will have a huge leg up in actually reaching your buyer.
The Takeaway
Having a crystal clear picture of your ideal buyer or persona in your head and within your organization will bring your conversion a huge lift
This is true to the word for businesses of all sizes. Understanding who you are targeting as an individual will make your content more compelling and persuade your prospects to take that next step.
Hope this was helpful.
When networking wizard Bettina is not working on the next big idea, then she is focusing on how to constantly improve workflows, and systemizing the “stuff that is not so much fun but needs to be done”. She believes in giving and that being kind gets you a long way.
You might spot her as a keynote speaker, a guest lecturer at universities, or a mentor at StartupLive or Greenstart by Climate and Energy Fonds Austria.
Bettina describes herself as a foodie, travel addict, and her team sees her as a true leader, who always encourages everyone she is working with.
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