Understand Your Audience with Buyer Personas
All great marketing strategies start with a great buyer persona. If you don’t know who you are selling to you can’t generate demand from your audience. Many organizations make the mistake of not being able to answer basic demographic questions about their primary audience, even if it is right there in their database! This guide outlines the importance of developing a thorough buyer persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional, simplified version of your ideal customer that is created through research and basic data collection to answer questions like who, what, why, and how. Personas help improve understanding of the customer so that marketing messages and targeting can be tailored to that specific individual. Depending on your business model, you could have a few of these personas.
Putting Your Buyer Persona to Work
Personas have many uses within an organization, one of the most important being their influence on strategic segmentation because personas help you to have a better understanding of each customer type’s unique needs. When you are able to segment your target audience based on thoroughly constructed personas it can result in better and more targeted ad copy, a clearer understanding of your buyer’s journey, more accurate targeting in ads, and so much more.
Personas can also be used to help make decisions on the content your brand publishes on your site or in promotional advertising. Stuck on your next blog post? Review your persona profile to make sure your content addresses some of the most common objections or concerns your previously defined persona might have. Paid ads not working? Review your persona to see if your ad targeting is getting in front of your core audience.
Key Areas of a Persona
If you don’t have a defined customer persona for your brand, now is the time. This outline describes the five main categories to examine when creating a persona, who, what, where, why, and how.
- WHO: Establishes general information about your persona and highlights ways you can segment and target each core customer personas.
- WHAT: Explains your personas’ main social, psychological, and behavioral factors.
- WHERE: Outlines information sources that your buyer persona consumes, both for professional and educational purposes and for entertainment.
- WHY: Provides information about the consumers’ goals and challenges.
- HOW: Summarizes all the value your product can bring to the consumer.
Buyer personas are a mix of art and science and are created through market research, data collection, knowledge of the business, and creativity. Check out our step-by-step guide to creating your own buyer persona.
Getting Started
Your buyer persona should be the catalyst to all marketing campaigns. Once you have a well-defined buyer persona, marketing ideas, campaigns, copy, creative, messaging, and positioning all become easier to create specifically for your audience. So, be good to future you and build out a persona that will help you create smarter campaigns and drive value well into the future.
Are you looking for help to create or optimize your buyer persona? Let Well-Oiled Marketing help. Schedule a discovery call today and experience digital marketing made simple.
