The first rule of marketing is to know and understand who is your target audience. By simply knowing who your products and services will cater helps you to market your product or service better and more effectively. It also opens up the direction in which you can further upgrade your product or service.
That being said, many marketers, digital or otherwise, often focus more on what their business has to offer instead of what their customers want. This unconscious way of marketing products or services fails to create a connection that your brand must have to convince your customers to buy your product or service.
Therefore, small and large businesses and top digital marketing agencies spend a substantial amount of their total budget on research and development. This also includes audience research to understand what their customers like and dislike, what are their habits and behaviors. With this information, you can create something called a buyer persona.
This blog will look into various resources from where you can gain important information about your customers to create a detailed buyer persona.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional character profile you make that represents all the characteristics your ideal customer has. These characteristics may help you understand who your target customer is but it does not help you think like them to relate with them better as a brand. This is where a buyer persona becomes helpful for your business.
It is like an embodiment of a segment of your customers. So instead of worrying about what your thousands of customers will like or dislike, you will only have to worry about if “James” will like it or not.
It gives your business a direction where your production and its marketing should head towards. It gives you a clear idea of what you must add to your product or service to make it more customer-friendly. It helps you in choosing the channels for your marketing and in creating the content and creative needed for marketing your product.
A detailed buyer persona helps businesses to understand their target audience more closely than normal audience research. It allows you to see your brand and its products or services from the consumer’s perspective. When you understand the other perspective then you can create better marketing campaigns that are more effective and successful.
What comprises a buyer persona?
With buyer persona, you create a fictional person that has characteristics similar to what you have gathered from your audience research. You recognize their pain points, hobbies, and goals. And that information leads to a better understanding of your customer’s needs and demands.
So, when you create an ideal, fictional customer, you need to know the following things about the person.
- Name
- Age
- Location
- Interests
- Occupation
- Spending power
- Marital status
- Goals and pain points, etc.
If your client is a business, then you must know about its size and the decision making person. Here, the buyer persona may reflect the characteristics of that person.
This is what an average buyer persona looks like…
Moreover, you can have more than one buyer persona depending on the different types of customers buying your product or service for different needs. For example, the buyer persona of customers buying a microwave for the home will be different from those who are buying it for a restaurant.
Why buyer persona is needed for your business?
With a clear and detailed buyer persona, your marketing techniques will be more effective because then you will know where to find your audience, what voice to use so that it resonates with them, what channels to use for effective communication, and what points to focus on so your audience connects with your brand on a deeper and emotional level.
A specified buyer persona focuses all your marketing efforts on your target customer and how to address their needs through your digital marketing campaigns. This way, your digital marketing campaigns will bring in higher results that will turn to increased sales and profit.
Furthermore, if you can also target your audience more precisely when you already know their characteristics with the buyer persona. Social media offers advanced targeting options where you can use the information that you have to target your ad to the correct audience. A buyer persona helps you in adding the advanced metrics to the targeting field. Different social media ad campaigns can target different customer groups depending on how many different buyer personas you have created.
Where can you gather data for a buyer persona?
To create a detailed buyer persona you need to research your audience. However, the old ways of researching where the marketer asks consumers to fill long survey forms are long gone. The internet has become a real-time research space that constantly adds tons of data from your customers themselves.
You can do your audience research from the data that your customers and followers provide you through analytics. Social media analytics and Google Analytics give you enough data which you can leverage to create your buyer persona.
Social Media Analytics
Your social media post analytics show that who your audience is, what age group do they belong to, what work do they do, and what are their interests. Based on that, you can modify your content and creatives to match their voice and likes.
Social analytics, especially that of Facebook, gives you a detailed report on your audience’s age, gender, occupation, family status, and interests. As mentioned earlier, this information is important while creating a buyer persona.
You can gather the analytics from different social media networks on a single interface by using the social management software. It allows you to manage your social media presence more efficiently by scheduling posts and syncing all your inboxes in one place. It also gives you a detailed report of every social media post on any platform along with its performance, in one place.
Search Engine Analytics
Your website analytics also has a lot of important information about your customers. It tells you what is the location of your customers, which social media are they using the most (from where they found your website), what age group they belong to, and similar other information.
You can use Google Analytics to find out more about your target audience and their characteristics to create a buyer persona. Google Analytics also gives you an overview of the interests of your audience. Based on that, you can create a detailed buyer persona that includes the goals, frustration, as well as a small bio telling what kind of person is your target customer.
Other resources
Other than the analytics gathered from social media and search engines, there are other places where you can gather information on your customers to create a buyer persona.
These resources include online forums, social listening tools, and similar other websites and software to understand what is popular in your industry and who is engaging with that popular content. Chances are, these people may also be your potential customers.
Conclusion
Your buyer persona does not need to be different for different people, you simply need to make sure that the one you create has the characteristics of all. Depending on what is the end use of your product, you can create separate buyer personas. So a chef buying a microwave for the home will be in the same segment with the homemaker buying it for home but if the microwave is for a restaurant, then the segment changes.
To create a good buyer persona, social media analytics, search engine analytics, and other online resources are great to gather the required data. You can gather social media analytics faster by using social management software. It collects all the analytics from different social media networks and shows them to you on one single platform. You can use the social management software for free with the trial credits.
Have you created a buyer persona for your brand? Let us know in the comments below. And if you think that this blog may help someone you know, share it with them.
Ebulk Marketing 