Buyer personas are essential for a marketing-focused business to succeed to its fullest potential. You can’t market correctly without at least a broad idea of who you’re marketing to.
This guide will help you to craft the most useful buyer personas possible.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer personas are semi-fictitious representatives of the consumers of your product, based on data. These buyer personas are perfect in helping you figure out what kind of campaign you should undertake next to draw in more attention. It can also help you change your product or social media communication to appeal more to your buyer persona.
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Buyer personas are usually defined by:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Marital status
- Children or no children
- Location
These key factors will open paths to various business strategies you can put in place to pull in more people like your buyer persona.
As an example, for a car-part selling business:
Buyer Persona: Rambling Roy
- 50 – 60 (Probably old fashioned, no social media)
- Male (Interest in cars as he is on the site)
- Economical (Probably can afford the parts as cars can be expensive to “tune” up).
Now, this isn’t a complete buyer persona but identifying these key features is a great way to start.
How Do I Gather Data for Buyer Personas?
One of the easiest ways is to add an optional survey form for visitors to fill out. This will help you to understand what kind of people are attracted to your website. Another is to gather data through your social media platforms by doing a deep dive to figure it out.
Once this data has been gathered, you then need to sort it out in an organized manner to fully understand it. By organising through the patterns and trends that may emerge you will eventually figure out your buyer persona.
Let’s say these are the results of your survey:
- 50% of customers are aged between 30 – 39
- 25% of customers are aged between 40 – 49
- 25% of customers are aged between 20 – 29
This means that by looking at your most popular demographic it can be determined that most of your buyers are between 30-39-years old. This information can now be added to your buyer persona.
What if I Want to Change my Buyer Persona?
You can change your buyer persona anytime you want, but your buyer personas are the majority of your consumers so you would have to change your product. So if you’re changing your buyer personas, you may have to change your business strategies too.
Simply put, your buyer persona is just a more intricate demographic infographic.
However, once you have figured out how to make a buyer persona, creating a new one should be much easier and simpler.
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How Do I Craft the Actual Buyer Persona?
Crafting a buyer persona is pretty simple when it comes to it because all you are really doing is organising data. You are basically organising the results of your survey and identifying the most popular results. These popular results will be your buyer persona.
Organise it in a neat way using software like Microsoft PowerPoint to portray this buyer persona character clearly for your company to see and act upon in further strategies.
Everything you do should now be focused on gathering more consumers that align with your buyer persona as they are your majority consumer.
Conclusion
Buyer personas can be tricky to get a hang of. However, once you go through the initial process and craft one for yourself, you come to realise that it is a lot easier than you think. It’s a very useful and effective tool to help you find who you are selling your product to.
You only need a few buyer personas, so don’t go crazy making them. It’s likely you’ll have a lot of people like “Rambling Roy” who are your majority, but you may have a “Mechanic Mike” who is your second most popular consumer. You can then adapt your marketing strategies to appeal to both buyer personas. For example, use different social media sites to appeal to different buyer personas.
This guide should help you to understand the basics of buyer personas.
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