One of the most important parts of marketing is understanding your ideal customer. To do this, you need to create a buyer persona to know who you are targeting and what they want.
But business owners often find themselves asking what their buyer persona is. They might be wondering how to create a buyer persona, and the answer is that you should start by asking yourself some questions. What are your products or services? Who are they for? When do they need them? Where do they buy from you now? How can you reach out to this person better on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter?
The answers to these questions will help determine who your target customer is and allow you to have more effective marketing campaigns. Chapter three of our small business marketing guide talks about how creating a buyer persona can help increase revenue!
Here are the main topics of this chapter in case you want to jump ahead.
But before we go any further, you might be asking what a buyer persona is exactly. Let me explain in detail.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal or target customer. A buyer persona will help you understand the motivations and needs that person has and their demographic information.
Buyer personas help you understand who your potential customers are, what they care about, and how you can meet their needs. This is important because according to a study, NetProspex’s target persona creation efforts increased page views by double, the duration of site visits increased by 900%, and marketing ROI spiked by 171%.
In the past, there was a general assumption that buyers were male or female, young or middle-aged. However, now we know this is not always true!
For example, if your company sells clothing for women between the ages of 18 and 35, then it would be helpful to create different personas that show how they differ from each other.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important to Your Business?
A customer persona can also help you make data-driven decisions about pricing, messaging, and product development.
Buyer personas are a powerful tool for small businesses because it helps them think through their marketing strategies before investing time or money in the wrong direction.
It’s also important to consider who you are targeting with your marketing efforts.
If you’re selling a product that appeals to men over the age of 45, it is unlikely they would be interested in reading about how to use Snapchat. This would make it extremely difficult for your sales team to close deals.
A buyer persona is just one more tool in the small business owner’s arsenal. Creating buyer personas and finding the best way to market to them will increase your conversion rates exponentially. 71% of businesses that exceeded sales and revenue goals crate their buyer personas.
Buyer personas are a powerful marketing strategy for small businesses because it helps them think through their marketing strategies before investing time or money in the wrong direction. It can also help make data-driven decisions about pricing, messaging, and product development. You can use Google Analytics to find details about your existing traffic to help you create the perfect persona.
How To Create a Buyer Persona
You want to identify a specific type of customer and then build your marketing strategy around their needs.
To start with, compile data on your existing customer base and social audience by using things like:
- Location
- Age range
- Language preferences
- Level of education
- Spending power
- Interest
- Motivations
This will give you an idea of where they come from and what their interests may be.
You can also consider details such as challenges that they’re facing in life right now. For example:
- Do these people have children?
- Are they struggling with a particular problem?
- Are they looking for a new job?
The stage of life that is most important for them at this time (maybe it’s retirement), etc., all while keeping track of which personas tend to respond best to certain messages/themes).
Learn Which Marketing Channels Your Persona Uses
It’s important to know which social networks real people use to make it easier for you to market your business to your persona.
For example, if a large percentage of the people in your target audience use Facebook all day long and they’re not on Instagram at all, then that’s where you should focus most of your effort.
This is also helpful because it will help you figure out what type of content to create (e.g., blog posts, video creations, social media updates, etc.).
Analyze Your Competitors Customers
If you’re a new business, analyzing your competition will be extra helpful.
This is also important if you’re an established business and want to take a new direction with your marketing or create innovative content.
You can do this by looking at the social media followers, analyzing their current customer reviews, following what they share on Facebook, etc., then putting yourself in the perspective of those who buy from them.
Understand Your Persona’s Pain Points
To understand your prospective customer’s pain points, you must ask yourself some questions.
What issues are they dealing with at the moment?
What are their fears?
How do they think about the future?
By understanding these, you can create content that will resonate with them. For example, if your customer is anxious and worried about what tomorrow might bring for them, creating a post on managing better stress would be an excellent idea!
You can also ask a pain point question at the beginning of your message to grab your potential customer’s attention.
You want to remind them that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Let them know that your product or service is the solution to their problems.
Understand Your Persona’s Goals
Opposite to understand their pain points, it’s also important to understand your customer’s goals.
The first step in understanding your persona’s goals is figuring out who the customer really is. Ask yourself these questions:
What do they want to achieve?
How will your product or service help them get there?
If you don’t know what their goal is, how can you write something related to it?!
Understand How Your Business Can Help
This might seem obvious, but by taking a moment to identify how your products or services help your potential customers, you can create a strategy that will resonate with them.
Next, I will go over how to identify a persona and create the best strategy that will resonate with them.
Identifying a Pesona Example
There are many different types of people you can create a buyer persona for, and in this article, I’ll take the example of this 18-year-old female named Julie to help you get started.
Step One: You need to understand what type of person she is (i.e., her lifestyle, what she likes to do for fun).
Julie is 18 years old and lives at home with her parents. She doesn’t have a lot of money but still considers herself as someone who appreciates fashion. One thing that Julie really wants in life is to attend college.
Step Two: Next, you want to identify the problems and pain points that Julie is currently experiencing.
Julie’s biggest problem at the moment is finding enough money to pay for college, which she hopes will solve most of her other problems. She doesn’t have a job but spends a lot of time browsing eCommerce websites like Forever21 or H&M because it gives her some sense of control when she’s not in school.
Step Three: The next step is to identify how Julie might be feeling about her current situation and what could potentially help change that.
Julie feels overwhelmed with the amount of debt college will bring and hopeful at the thought of experiencing freedom from living under her parents’ rules for once in her life.
Step Four: Next, define what Julie’s goals are and how she wants to feel when those goals have been accomplished.
Julie hopes that one day she’ll be able to afford a home in California with her own bedroom so she can learn about herself without being constantly judged by her family or questioned on why the other kids think she’s weird.
Persona: Julie is an 18-year-old female who likes to read the latest fashion magazine but doesn’t always keep up with current trends. She needs a stylish and affordable clothing option to help her stay on top of what’s trending in fashion without breaking the bank. Julie would be really excited about receiving coupons or special discounts.
Creating a Marketing Strategy for Your Persona
Once you’ve identified who your buyer persona is, it’s time to create a marketing strategy for them.
Your buyer persona can help you figure out which type of content to create, how often it should be published, what tone or style the posts need to have to resonate with that particular audience, and so on.
Marketing strategy for Julie: Since Julie usually buys clothes in stores near her house, you might want to design a marketing strategy that focuses on in-store shopping.
The best method to reach Julie: Julie might be more responsive to social media advertising on Instagram and Tiktok. You can also try reaching her with email marketing, so make sure to implement a method to capture her email address, such as a coupon.
The marketing message for Julie: Hey Julie, we noticed you’re looking for trendy and affordable clothes. We thought of you when designing this outfit!
You can wear it with these shoes to achieve the perfect look without breaking your budget!
The store near you has a sale going on now, so don’t miss out on all the savings.
Store Location: 123 Main Street
It’s really that easy to come up with a few buyer personas for your business. At first, you may want to stick to only 2 or 3 personas so that you may focus your attention on creating the best marketing campaigns possible. According to an article on businessgrow.com, 90% of a business’s sales account for 3 to 4 buyer personas.
But before I end this chapter, let’s take a quick look at identifying the type of customers you don’t want or don’t provide services for.
What Is a Negative Buyer Persona?
While a buyer persona identifies who your ideal customer is, a negative persona will help you identify who you do not want as a customer.
A negative persona can be beneficial to your business as it will help you develop a plan on how to avoid sending out the wrong message that would attract this type of consumer.
If you own a solar panel company, then you know that your ideal customers are homeowners. Since investing in solar panels is a long-term investment, home renters would be considered a negative buyer persona.
The way you speak about products, the colors that catch their eye, even what type of music is playing in the background can all play a role in pulling them into your store or making them leave.
Final Thoughts on How to Create Your Buyer Persona
Chapter 3 is all about how to create your buyer persona. We’ve discussed everything you need to know, from defining your target audience and understanding the benefits of a buyer persona to decide which type of personas will work best for your business. Now it’s time we learned how to write our unique selling proposition so that customers can see what makes us different from everyone else in chapter 4!
