It is impossible to execute a successful digital marketing campaign if you do not understand the target audience you plan to reach. What's worse, it can be challenging to define and segment the audience correctly. Getting to know your audience can be done using a variety of techniques. Buyer Personas are one of them. In this article, you will learn how to build the best user personas, so you know exactly how to communicate with your target audience, and more importantly, how to capture their attention, and how to communicate to them which problems or struggles will be solved by choosing your product.
The Buyer Persona represents your ideal customer in the form of a fictional character. You can use this tool to better understand customer segments and formulate strategies aimed at satisfying their needs using actions that you know will satisfy them. Vaguely knowing the clients is pointless. If you want to be as effective as possible, you should delve into every detail of each persona type that you believe could benefit from your product or service.
To get started...
Researching your audience can be done in many different ways, but some of the most common are surveys, listening to what they talk about on social media, reading reviews of similar products online, and attending focus groups and interviews.
Identify any commonalities you might have with your existing customers if you already have them. Think of your ideal prospect if you don't have any customers yet. Which demographic group do they belong to? Does this person have any needs or wants? How do they decide whether to make a purchase?
Consider looking at your competitors as another option. Consider the market they serve, if there are any gaps or unmet needs you can fill, and see if you can fill them. You can also ask for feedback on your website or social media, or you can survey potential customers directly.
To build the best user personas, all you have to do is make up answers to questions for your ideal prospect. Here are the basic ones that you should answer for them to get you started.
To start out with your buyer personas, let’s make real people of them first. You want to start by writing basic demographic information. (Name, Age, Job, Family, Income, Location) Then, once you have that down and a little icon or picture for them, if you want, you just start asking them questions about themselves and their life.
You can align your marketing efforts with the values that matter most to potential customers by getting a sense of what resonates with them. Based on the answers to these questions, you can tailor your marketing messages to better connect with your target market.
Build a Buyer Persona |
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| Category | Sub Category | Answer |
| Background | Job | |
| Career path | ||
| Family | ||
| Demographics | Sex | |
| Age | ||
| Income | ||
| Location | ||
| Interests | Hobbies | |
| Media | ||
| Influencers | ||
| Websites | ||
| Identifiers | What are they like? | |
| How do they communicate? | ||
| Goals | Goal #1 | |
| Goal #2 | ||
| Challenges | Challenge #1 | |
| Challenge #1 | ||
| What can we do? | To help achieve their goal | |
| To help overcome their challenges | ||
| Common objectives | Why wouldn't they buy? | |
| Elevator pitch | What's the value prop? | |
There are limitless sources of data online, but here are the main ones that will work best:
Your customer intake forms one of the many ways that you can use forms to grow your business. Customer intake forms are like little interviews with real people in your target market. They answer questions that can give insight into your prospects' goals, worries, struggles, and expectations. If you have existing clients or have an ad running where people call your 1-800 number to take a quick survey, and you have the forms that are filled out stored somewhere or your calls recorded, try to collect them and go over them carefully for any answers to your buyer persona questions.
Competitors are not hard to find. They are out there doing the same thing that you are doing. Trying to drive and convert prospects. A good way to find out what’s going on on social media is by using a tool like IFFT or PhantomBuster to scrape tweets or posts from social media platforms using relevant hashtags. Another way is to search for a competitor’s username and dig through their posts to see what you can find.
Influencer research is smart for two reasons. One, they are crawling with people in your target market, and two, whatever they’re doing… It’s working! You can tell influencers apart in general because they will have a ton of followers, sometimes up in the millions. Or you can use a tool like hashtagify.me to pull influencers by keyword to find out who they are.
You can use social media platforms, groups, and pages to find more personal data about your target audience. Like who they follow, what type of content they engage with, and some of the conversations they have about similar products or services.
Creating the best user personas is not hard to do. It just takes sitting down to do the research. Surprisingly, people still put it off or forget to do their buyer personas. The sad part is that we believe the ones that take the time yield the best results.
