If you want to be selling your products or services effectively, you need to be familiar with the concept of buyer persona. A buyer persona, sometimes referred to as ‘customer persona’ or even ‘marketing persona’, helps you put yourself into your potential customers’ shoes, and create marketing content that can penetrate into their hearts and influence their buying decisions. It is what you need to get a grip on to come up with the most effective outreach marketing strategies.
Before we dive into the phenomenon of how a buyer persona helps you increase your sales, let’s talk more in detail about what is a buyer persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is the in-built personality and mindset of potential buyers that describes their actions and impacts their buying behavior. It is what you as a marketer need to understand so that your marketing campaigns are geared to tap into it and create a message that hits straight into the buyers’ minds, influencing them to buy instinctively from you.
Businesses are often lost in calculating their marketing expenses, tracking their conversion rates, and amending their marketing plans to compete. But focusing on the buyer persona can help you to skip all the hiccups that are causing your sales and leads to go down. The more accurately you can tap into the mindset and lifestyle of your customers, the more influence you can have on their buying decisions. To do that, you need to put your customers’ needs and wants ahead of your own.
Marketing personas are a detailed description of your target audience. The description embodies a fictional person who has all the characteristics that would make him or her the ideal customer for your business.
The fictional person or the ‘customer persona’ is assigned a name, demographics, behavioral traits, interests, and lifestyle habits. All these traits are part of the persona research. The best marketers also describe the goals, buying patterns and, pain points of their marketing personas.
Some businesses even give it a face using vector illustrations or stock photography to make a buyer persona look more real. Then they convert the illustrations into 3D by creating cardboard cutouts of their marketing personas and placing them in their offices to keep the staff reminded that that’s the kind of person the business is targeting. This might sound a bit too far-fetched, but it works wonders psychologically by enabling a corporate team to get the real feel of their customer persona.
When the marketing team thinks and speaks about this model as though it’s a real person, it becomes easier for them to build great web content to influence the right people. The buyer persona thus acts as a guide in everything from product idea and product development to brand image and social media marketing.
When it comes to developing buyer personas, some businesses may develop more than one for the same product, especially when targeting different types or categories of customers for the same product. A business can’t go and speak of its targeted customer individually, so one customer persona for one category of customers serves the purpose of representing that group of people.
Why is a Buyer Persona Important for Your Business?
Creating buyer personas helps businesses grow in many ways. A buyer persona not only impacts your marketing efforts but makes a difference in your product development too. Persona research is, therefore, usually done before even a product prototype is manufactured.
Here are a few ways in which a buyer persona is vital for your business.
1. Develop Suitable Marketing Content
Whichever platforms or media you choose as your marketing channels, you need to be sure that your marketing content is angled to influence the right buyers. When you have a buyer persona, it guides you to write from the perspective of your exact ideal customer. When you know your customers’ pain points, you can create a problem statement based on those and offer solutions in the form of your products.
The more your customers feel that you are speaking directly to them, the more trust you are able to build around your brand. This helps you get your first few customers and build brand loyalty that gets you repeat purchases from your customer base. It is thus a fantastic means to effective brand management.
2. Target Social Media Ads More Accurately
The ads and campaigns that you run on social media sites have a chance to get to your potential customers the fastest. There is no time to tweak the message in the process if you begin a campaign that’s sending out the wrong signals about your product on social media. That’s why businesses need to be very particular in creating buyer personas for social media, as that will directly impact your brand image and sales volumes.
A thoroughly researched buyer persona helps you to target your social ads more accurately. The more detailed and well-defined your targeting options are, the more directly you can speak to the minds of your customers. When designing your social media campaigns, your buyer persona helps you make sure that your ads are shown to the exact people you want to sell your product to.
If you have created multiple marketing personas, you can create separate ads to target each. This is an advanced level of targeting ads, and is very good for enhancing your brand equity.
3. Increase Your Return on Investment
When you show your ads accurately to the exact people you’re targeting, you cut down on all the irrelevant reach from your marketing campaigns. This makes your marketing more cost-effective, as you are not wasting money and effort promoting your products to those who do not need them. Whoever you advertise to has at least a small chance to buy from you, or at the least, to show some kind of interest in your product. In other words, your customer persona description saves you from speaking to those who are not within your persona research. In this way, a buyer persona helps you to increase your return on investment.
How to Create Buyer Personas?
For creating buyer personas, you need to take the following steps to conduct effective persona research.
1. Do Thorough Market Research
Persona research requires you to carry out different kinds of market research.
- Competitor analysis helps you identify the buyer persona of your competitors.
- Market research keeps you updated with the pricing trends, trending products, and consumers’ general tastes and preferences.
- Gathering your past business trends and website analytics helps you to restrategize your campaigns and instill your findings into your next moves.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Choose Appropriate Social Media Channels
Depending on the type of products you are selling, you need to select the social media platforms that you will use to deliver your marketing messages to your potential customers. For instance, if you are selling fast-moving consumer products, you can opt for social media sites with short and quick posts accompanied by appealing product photos. These kinds of social media sites are Facebook and Instagram.
If you are an event management firm and have regular announcements to make, you can go with Twitter, where you can tweet about your upcoming or ongoing event sessions. If you are offering services related to recruitment and human resources, LinkedIn would be the best platform for you.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Once your buyer persona is ready, you will think more clearly about which platform your target customers are using the most.
3. Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points
By regularly checking on your ad campaigns and their analytics, you will be able to fine-tune your marketing content by observing the kind of messages that attract stellar engagements by viewers. Customers engage the most with content that hits on their pain points. These pain points make up a crucial part of your buyer persona.
Therefore, running your first few ad campaigns is actually part of your developing buyer personas. It helps you streamline your target market’s description according to the points that trigger them the most.
4. Write a Sales Copy That Sells
Now that you have all the information that you need, it is time to write your sales copy and publish it on your chosen marketing channels. If you already have a website, you might want to tweak your landing page to get more conversions. You also need to match your product descriptions with your buyer persona.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
If you do not have a website for your brand, we are here to offer you a website builder that enables you to develop a full-fledged website in just a couple of hours.
Image taken from Strikingly
Building a site on Strikingly does not require you to have any programming or coding skills. A buyer persona won’t do you much good if you do not have a solid online presence for your brand. But a quality website combined with thorough persona research can help you increase your sales beyond limits.
