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1. What is a buyer persona ?
For a brand to succeed in its effort to reach a wider target audience, the first and most important step is to identify who your target audience really is. This audience profiling process allows you to know who exactly your target audience is and how to adapt marketing communications to achieve and exceed the desired level of personalization.
Audience profiling can help you identify your different segments and focus specifically on those that have the most buying power. Creating and using targeted marketing campaigns that can generate conversions in specific customer segments will help you generate sustainable growth.
Even though many businesses are still talking nonstop about data and its applications, modern marketing requires so much more. Regardless of the size of your business, your performance will depend on your ability to understand your audience.
Building an audience profile ensures that your marketing campaigns can consistently generate a good return on investment (ROI). Audience profiling includes four fundamental principles that every business should consider. These principles are as follows:
Segmentation
If you know how marketing works, you may already be aware of the role that segmentation plays in it. Businesses have been using segmentation for years to understand their audience. Segmentation is the process of dividing your customers into demographic segments such as age, location, or gender.
This allows you to refine attributes specific to each demographic segment and helps you target marketing communication accordingly. However, you don't have to stop there.
Advanced segmentation techniques allow you to take into account consumer behaviors, which will then allow you to create personalized audiences using tools. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics and Optimove to effectively segment your customers into groups that you can then target to generate positive results for your brand.
Plus, by segmenting your audience in this way, you'll save a lot of time and resources.
Messaging
Thanks to segmentation, you will already have a lot of information about the interests, preferences, and perceptions of your customers. Now, it's time for you to start creating content that's tailored to each of these defined customer segments.
It may sound easy, but remember that the right message can make all the difference in the success of your marketing campaign. Creating relevant content that speaks to your customers is a sure way to make your marketing message work for you.
Your marketing message should be based on the information you've gathered from your customer segments. It will also allow you to create messages that have an affinity with your target audience, so that they produce effective results.
Commitment
Once you've identified the specific audience segments you want to focus on, and have crafted the right message for those segments, you're well on your way to making a difference.
The next critical step you need to take is making sure your messages get the engagement they deserve. For this, it is of the utmost importance to understand where and when the message should be delivered. Some important factors to keep in mind include the devices used to deliver the message, the critical moments for sending those messages, the consumption of content, and behavioral aspects.
Choosing the right platform at the right time can have a significant impact on your marketing budget. For example, if your product/service is aimed at a young audience, a platform such as social media or email may be more effective. On the other hand, if you're targeting businesses, you should consider more formal platforms to drive engagement.
Measure
If you're a seasoned marketer, you might already know what's in store for you.
It's important to quantify your marketing efforts not only to get good results, but also to refine and improve your approach over time. To do this, you need to clearly define the goals and the expected return on investment from the start. This will help you identify the reference points that your marketing strategy should reach.
Measuring your audience profiling process will help you set these benchmarks and goals effectively. Analyzing and tracking metrics and key performance indicators related to your marketing campaigns will help you better understand what's working and what's not. Additionally, it will also help you identify specific platforms that are effective for you.
Measuring the impact of your efforts to improve the message and engagement of your campaigns, as well as their effectiveness, will help you achieve your marketing strategy.
2. What is a “buyer persona”?
The term “marketing persona” or “buyer persona” is too often used and not always well understood. You may have heard marketing managers talk about a fictional character who dictates and informs their strategies and processes. The product of thorough research, the buyer persona is a crucial part of a successful marketing campaign.
Buyer persona research requires marketers to study their customers and everything about their behavior and preferences. This research is done through extensive primary market research, which will result in the collection of real data from your existing customers. Creating a buyer marketing persona will require you to go into detail about your customers' identity and explore their unique traits and characteristics. This will help you create content for customers in a way that is relevant and more appropriate to the context.
Businesses generally develop 3 to 5 buyer personas, in order to be able to adapt marketing campaigns perfectly to the different types of targeted segments. Of course, you'll need to consider different types of attributes, such as geographic location and customer demographics.
Additionally, you will also need to gather more information about the following attributes:
Objectives
Understanding the goals and objectives of your customers may be the first step in identifying their needs. This approach is critical to ensuring that you are able to provide the type of marketing content and sales service that they prefer.
For example, is your buyer targeting the next big promotion at work? Is your buyer saving feverishly to be able to retire soon? Is he actively trying to lose weight?
Researching these answers will help you convince your customers that your product/service will help them reach their goals.
Challenges
The second attribute you need to pay attention to is the type of challenges your target customers may be facing. Brands can potentially increase sales and perform much better if they get to know the pain points of each of your buyer personas.
Ask yourself: what are the obstacles they face in reaching their goals? What challenges do they face that you can potentially solve?
Remember, the more successful you are at resolving these issues, the more likely you are to be successful in selling your product/service to customers.
Fears
The next attribute you need to know about your customer while creating a buyer persona is their fears. Getting to know this specific aspect of each buyer persona will help you remove any doubts they may have about your product or service.
Find out if your buyers have particular concerns that might deter them from trying your product/service. For example, they may have tried a competing product and not found it useful. They may have lost all the money they spent on this product, making them more fearful of trying such products/services again.
Here, you're looking for answers to questions like:
- What are the fears of your potential buyers?
- What is stopping them from buying your product/service?
- How can you help alleviate these fears?
Armed with this information, you can adapt your marketing communication to allay these fears and thus sell your product more effectively to your customers.
Love and hate
It goes without saying that if you're interested in your shoppers' fears and pain points, you should also pay attention to what they like and don't like. This will help you attract customers with content that is most likely to interest them.
Understanding what you like and what you don't like can allow you to create content with targeted messages and engaging copy that will immediately catch customers' attention.
Let's say you're a SaaS company promoting your EduTech product. If you know that some of your customers like a simple, uncomplicated user interface, and don't like big videos that increase load times, how are you going to satisfy them? This information can help you address these customers specifically and let them know about your simple, user-friendly design and fast load times.
This simple example of a buyer persona, with its likes and dislikes, shows you that you can promote your product in a more targeted way if you get to know your customers better.
Hobbies
By better understanding your customers' hobbies and interests, you can get a sense of how they like to spend their time. When we talk about hobbies, we are talking about activities such as pottery, sports, or crafts.
Here, you'll need to ask yourself questions like:
- What do customers like to spend their time doing?
- What types of tools or accessories do they need?
- How can you help them spend more time on these hobbies?
The answers to these questions will help you tailor your message to convince customers that your product/service will help them spend more time on their leisure activities.
3. Why are Buyer Personas important?
The role of buyer personas is quite clear: to understand the needs and desires of your customer. This can help you tailor your communication to meet these preferences and desires.
Also, if you want your message and communication to be correct, you must first understand their needs and your place in that context. It's the only way to help your customers navigate and actively participate in the buying decision process.
With the constant evolution of marketing dimensions, the way customers like to interact with your marketing message has also evolved.
According to Accenture, more than 90% of consumers are convinced that brands should strive to personalize the offers and recommendations they make to their customers.
With this in mind, it is more essential than ever to have clear marketing personas. If these reasons are not obvious enough, here is a list of other reasons why you should give more importance to buyer personas:
- They help you better understand your potential customer
- They can help you optimize your budget and marketing efforts.
- They can help you target the right customers at the right time on the right platforms.
- They can eliminate customer segments that aren't likely to generate business for you.
- They can help you connect and engage with the most valuable customers in an organic and engaging way.
With a plethora of reasons like these that support the creation of buyer personas, every brand should consider integrating this process into their marketing strategy. In addition, this approach will not only attract new potential customers to your business, but also maintain the satisfaction of existing customers.
4. Where are Buyer Personas used?
We're sure you have a pretty good understanding of what buyer personas are and why they're so important to your marketing strategy.
But did you know that buyer personas play a crucial role in many of your company's verticals? If you're eager to find out how, keep reading.
Product development
If you've ever started developing a product, you might already know how time-consuming and laborious it can be. From defining a vision for your product to creating a functional prototype, there is a lot to do. That said, it's one of the most important sectors in any business, and it's worth the effort.
The process of creating a product roadmap may be the way to go, but it won't be as efficient as you'd like it to be if customer needs aren't addressed. With the help of buyer personas, you will have an overview of the needs, wants, and preferences of your customers, which you can then integrate seamlessly into your product.
By having a buyer persona, or “user persona,” as it's called in product management jargon, managers can reduce the features that are most likely to cause real problems for users, and focus on the needs of users who belong to the most targeted segments. You'll also be able to identify specific features and elements that are currently missing in the product but are likely to make customers happy if integrated.
Marketing
We've already talked at length about the different ways that buyer personas can contribute to marketing strategies. Whether your marketing strategies take a traditional approach or the now mainstream digital approach, buyer personas are absolutely essential for marketing.
Buyer personas can be even more useful when refining specific elements of your marketing strategy. For example, in terms of a content marketing strategy, buyer personas can contribute to a good keyword research strategy that can then offer you numerous SEO benefits. You can also define keywords for each type of buyer persona based on what stage of the sales funnel they are in. In fact, by using buyer personas in content marketing, you can create content that works for you as well as for your customers.
Additionally, buyer personas can help you filter promotional activities and prioritize those that generate the most results for your brand.
Sales
Did you think that the usefulness of buyer personas was limited to marketing and product development? Well, not quite.
Your sales team will be able to use the marketing personas you create just as much as these other verticals. As we've seen before, buyer personas can provide important information about the preferences and psychology of your potential customers.
Salespeople will be able to offer better service to prospects and potential customers, with the help of buyer personas. They will have a better idea of what their potential customers like and don't like and can adapt their communication with them accordingly. Additionally, if they better understand the difficulties and challenges of prospects, your sales team will have a better chance of presenting your product/service as a solution.
Customer support
One of the main challenges that customer support teams face is the lack of adequate customer information that could help them improve the quality of service.
According to Salesforce, more than 70% of consumers attest that a brand's ability to understand their individual needs has a significant impact on their loyalty. Customer support teams can use buyer personas to serve customers in the best way possible.
It bodes well for a brand to train all its customer-facing teams in the use of buyer personas. Customer support teams will be able to help customers with more empathy if they know more about their pain points and frustrations.
5. What type of business should consider defining the audience profile?
You now have a detailed overview of the various business functions that can benefit from audience profiling and buyer personas. Now let's see which businesses can take advantage of it.
B2B
Ask any marketer and they'll tell you: marketing and promoting to businesses is no easy task. They have tight budgets and you will probably need to convince several members of your team before you can consider selling them your product or service.
At the same time, if these business customers see value in your offering, you can expect to look for a lot of business. But how do you remain visible and meet the needs of these customers?
Nearly 44% B2B marketers say digital marketing is one of their top marketing expenses. It is therefore possible to reduce costs by setting up the right marketing personas. Setting up a buyer persona will also allow you to establish greater market specificity and better adapt your messages to your professional customers. Today, B2B marketers are working to create personalized experiences through their websites and email marketing campaigns.
After all, more than 75% B2B sales and marketing professionals believe that personalization can help strengthen customer relationships. And we're sure you're already aware of the critical role that these customer relationships can play in B2B marketing.
As mentioned earlier, B2B buying decisions can potentially involve multiple people in an organization. So, creating multiple buyer personas in B2B campaigns is a great way to ensure that you are able to generate more sales and conversions.
B2C
Customizations not only dominate B2B marketing preferences, but also impact the effectiveness of B2C marketing strategies. It goes without saying that personalization helps brands adapt communication and target their customers more effectively.
Plus, customers will be able to establish multiple points of connection with your brand and will likely be more loyal to it. This will inevitably lead to a significant increase in your turnover.
In B2C marketing, buyer personas can easily become your tool to differentiate yourself and stand out from your competitors. B2C or D2C brands can also use buyer personas to attract and convert customers directly in traditional stores as well as on online platforms.
So, if you see the use of buyer personas to increase sales, all types of businesses can exploit buyer personas in different ways to generate desired results. So it's not a question of who, but how businesses can use their buyer personas in their marketing strategies.
6. How do you create a “buyer persona” for your business?
We're pretty sure you now know the why and the how of audience profiling and buyer personas. If you're excited to get started creating personas and wondering how to go about it, don't worry—we've got you covered.
Here's a five-step process you can follow to develop buyer personas as part of content marketing and other business processes:
Step 1: Do a basic “buyer persona” search.
When we talk about research in the process of creating buyer personas, we take into account internal and external research. As with anything strategic and never documented, you need to conduct thorough research to create effective buyer personas.
The first step? Start with the people who are already working with you, and go on to research potential customers.
For your existing customers, prepare a list of questions such as:
- Who is the point of contact on the customer side?
- What are their roles and responsibilities?
- How did they get to know you?
- What type of content do they like to consume?
- What does their personal life look like?
By keeping these details in mind, you'll be able to refine the profile of potential buyers you target in the future. Equipped with this information, your search can now be diversified to find multiple types of information.
It's always a good idea to talk to your customer-facing employees now. They can give you a better understanding of pain points and challenges that existing customers, as well as prospects, often face. This part of the research is known as affinity mapping.
Next, you need to look at the steps your competitors are taking to increase conversions. This is especially useful if you have a list of prospects who don't seem to convert despite your best efforts.
Reviewing your competitors' strategies will help you understand what your own strategy might be missing and need to add.
Finally, you should take the monitoring and use of your analyses very seriously. Nothing will give you a more objective and accurate overview of your buyers than your analytics. Here you can look at metrics related to your website, advertising campaigns, and social media performance to understand how your potential customers are interacting with you.
In this process, tools such as Google Analytics, SEMrush and Ahrefs can be more useful than you think and contribute to a better campaign.
Step 2: Segment your buyer personas
If you have successfully completed and applied your skills to complete Step 1, you should now have a significant repository of information. It should contain detailed information about your current buyers, the challenges your prospects face, and the strategies your competitors are using to mitigate them.
Congratulations: the longest and most arduous part of the process is over.
Once you return, you will find that this information is most likely stored and categorized randomly. It's a good time to take our next step.
The next step in the buyer personas creation process is to segment all of this information. Since you have a wide variety of information at your disposal, the first thing you need to do is look for similarities. Looking for these similarities in such large data sets will allow you to group together customers with similar goals and challenges.
Once you've grouped these customer data sets together, you can now determine how many buyer personas you want to have. Yes, we say that there will be several. It would be quite restrictive to include all your different customers in a single buyer persona, right?
You can create as many as you want. But remember that not all buyer personas need to start taking shape right away. Feel free to take a step back and gather more information about specific customer segments if needed. In the long run, this can only help you create more detailed personas.
Now comes the final step in your segmentation process!
Segment the customer data groups you have at your disposal. Some of the criteria you can consider include demographics, job titles, and industry. This will help you define clear buyer personas and specific strategies to target each of them.
Step 3: Focus on goals and pain points
If you can't wait to see your buyer personas take shape, don't worry, you're almost there!
Now that you've divided all customer data into clear segments, you'll see accurate models and a more organized database. Now it's time to add that extra layer of detail that will differentiate your buyer personas.
Remember collecting pain points and buyer persona goals from your existing and potential customers? You are going to focus on this step.
After the previous step, you need to have clear segments of customer data that contain their demographic and business details. Add to each of them the goals and pain points that you have identified for these specific segments. This will help you get a clear picture of everything you need to know about your customers.
Step 4: Compile and create personas and strategies
Now let's move on to the part you've been looking forward to since step 1: the actual creation of your buyer personas.
You have collected all the data. You have carefully categorized and organized them. You segmented them into clear groups. All you have to do is compile all this information and create your final buyer personas.
Create an innovative name and a unique story for each of your buyer personas. Who are they? What is their life like? What does their typical day look like? Add as much detail as you want to each of these buyer personas.
Set a 20-minute deadline for each buyer persona and write down as many details as you know about them. In the end, you will have a visual and textual overview of a typical buyer that you want to target through your business processes.
Now, we're sure you had a list of strategies in mind to effectively target customers. With the help of the buyer personas you've just created, you can associate strategies with specific customer segments to target them more effectively. There is a good chance that new buyer personas will generate the need to modify existing strategies or create new ones.
For example, if you've just discovered that there's an entire segment of customers who prefer to get useful information through social media, check out the current social media strategies you've put in place. Are they adequate or do they need to be updated? If the answer is no, feel free to implement a new, more robust strategy.
Step 5: Establish a communication and message strategy accordingly
If you are at this stage, you have probably completed the rest of the steps effectively. Well done!
So now you have your potential buyers. You have a list of effective strategies that will work for each of them. What is the next step, you ask?
Well, it's time to put all that hard work to good use.
Take a close look at your current communication and messaging strategy. Does it respond adequately to messages from all of your buyer personas? It's very unlikely that one type of message will work for everyone.
It is therefore the ideal time to develop a specific communication and messaging strategy for each buyer persona. You should, of course, familiarize your marketing and sales teams with each of the buyer personas and guide them in the process to adopt for each of them.
It's also a great time to take a second look at your existing content and website. Ask yourself if they meet the needs and questions of one or more buyer personas that you have just created. If not, feel free to make changes that will help you get more traction from these marketing buyer personas.
7. How do you use the Buyer Persona for marketing?
You've worked so hard to create and develop buyer personas - all of that shouldn't be in vain, right?
Even though we've talked a lot about the different business processes that your buyer personas can contribute to, marketing is undoubtedly one of the most important.
After all, nearly 82% of businesses admitted to improving their value proposition using buyer personas.
On this point, let's take a look at the steps you need to take to effectively use the buyer persona in marketing.
1. Create the right content
At the risk of repeating ourselves, the Content marketing is one of the vertical sectors where your buyer personas can be used intensively.
When you know the goals, needs, and challenges of your target customers and have a detailed buyer persona in hand, the possibilities are endless. Ask any content marketer, and you'll find that they're mostly concerned with integrating the four Ps of marketing into their content. Buyer personas respond to this concern and much more.
It's good to stop by from time to time to take stock of your existing content, especially after creating new marketing buyer personas. Inform your content strategy based on personas and create content that speaks to each of them.
Buyer personas will also help you create highly targeted content that will help customers corresponding to each of the buyer personas make buying decisions.
So, if you find that one of your buyer personas is likely to resonate the most with email newsletters, you know that you'll need to add that person to your content priority list. If you find that people need you to educate them and that subject groups can help, then go for it.
2. Select the right channels
In addition to finding the right content that is likely to be relevant and captivate each of your potential buyers, you'll also need to determine which channels perform best.
We already know how buyer personas can help you improve your business processes and strategies by making them more focused on user needs. Whether you call it audience persona or marketing persona, there's little doubt about the importance of choosing the right content delivery channels.
Your ability to effectively monitor analytics can be very useful in this case. If data from your analytics tools suggests that users prefer your website to any other platform for consuming content, it's time to strengthen your web strategy. But since you may have already integrated this information into the buyer personas you have created, there is no need to redo the analysis.
Your buyer persona will likely detail the specific platforms and channels they prefer for consuming content. You can use this data to create a content strategy that can deliver results.
3. Improve your sales funnel
Buyer personas can be very useful and contribute significantly to your sales processes. According to a study, 93% of businesses who exceeded their lead and revenue goals segmented their customers using buyer personas.
If that's not enough motivation to invest in buyer personas, we don't know what is!
Plus, if you can quantify your buyer personas, you'll be able to generate even more results and target higher conversions. Since buyer personas are so closely associated with conversions, we can automatically attribute it as a vital tool for your sales team.
With well-designed buyer personas, you can focus on reducing customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increasing customer lifespan value (CLV). These are two of the main metrics that indicate the performance of your sales funnel and should form the basis of your sales strategy.
4. Improve your email marketing
It's hard to conclude a discussion about sales and conversions without mentioningemail marketing. This shows how important it is in marketing and sales strategies. From lead generation to after-sales service, everything related to business or marketing today involves emails.
According to a study by MLT Creative, the use of buyer personas makes it possible to multiply the email opening rate by two and the click rate by five. Buyer personas can therefore lead the way by adding more value to email marketing campaigns and improving the quality of the content of these emails.
Buyer Personas can potentially convert your subscribers into customers. This can be done by:
- Creating personalized subject lines and content that appeal to subscribers
- Sending personalized offers to potential customers to encourage them to buy.
- Provide customers with tailored, personalized content with lucrative CTAs.
- Present a strong CTA that leads to powerful landing pages
You can do all of this and more if you have the data and information that buyer personas can give you.
5. Personalize your marketing efforts
Customization. Personalization.
We know you've heard it enough times, and we've already talked about it in this article several times. But in fact, it can easily become one of the best approaches to creating content that generates impact.
80% of consumers are likely to buy from a brand that offers personalized offers and experiences. Given this popularity, it's no surprise that marketers are willing to go the extra mile to create unique experiences for each customer. After all, it's definitely worth it.
Whether it's attracting a customer through highly targeted advertising or creating an exceptional after-sales experience using personalized solutions, all the useful information can be drawn from buyer personas.
It's no wonder that creating marketing personas is important for creating compelling campaigns in the near future.
8. Buyer Persona examples
We've talked enough about buyer personas and audience profiling to get you interested and get you started. But if you still don't know how to create powerful buyer personas, we'll discuss and understand them using a few examples.
To get a more global perspective, we're going to look at a B2B example as well as a B2C example.
Let's look at an example of a B2C buyer persona published by Juny Lee on LinkedIn.
As you can tell, the marketer who created this particular persona dug into important details about Choi's personal and professional preferences. The fact that the persona has been detailed in the first person makes it more unique - it's just one way you can approach creating buyer personas.
The fictional first-person story that was added to the buyer persona improves its effectiveness. It will encourage customer-facing teams and marketers to get to know their customers better and to target them with a more empathetic approach.
Now let's take a look at a B2B buyer persona to better understand how it works.
This example shared by alexa details a buyer persona visually and textually. The personality scale that has been added to the persona is a great touch and can potentially tell you a lot about the type of customers you're targeting. Plus, you also have enough information about their motivations, goals, and pain points to understand what makes them click.
The biography then connects the persona perfectly and highlights the knowledge and experience that it has, and that customers matching that buyer persona will also possess.
