Developing Your Buyer Personas to Attract Your Ideal Audience

by Content Marketing

How can you attract your ideal audience and turn them into loyal customers? If you don’t have a clear picture of just who is in that ideal audience, you’ll be wasting time and resources trying to get their attention. Developing buyer personas is one of the best ways to refine your marketing to generate more leads that will actually convert.

Buyer Persona Basics

It takes some time and effort to develop fully fleshed buyer personas, but’s well worth it. Once you have a detailed breakdown of your ideal customers, you can craft marketing messages that directly appeal to them. Here are the basic elements of a buyer persona:

  • Interests

What do they enjoy doing? What are their hobbies? How do they spend their free time and money?

  • Background

This encompasses things like educational and career background.

  • Demographics

Is your ideal customer male or female? Are they married? Do they have children? Where do they live- in a rural, urban, or suburban setting? What’s their annual income? What type of housing do they live in?

  • Challenges

Think about the challenges that your buyer faces and how it impacts them on a daily basis. This should be related to your product so that you can get a clearer understanding of how you can offer the solution to overcome their challenge.

  • Goals

What are your ideal customer’s goals? Come up with both primary and secondary goals.

Developing Your Buyer Personas

Once you have gathered the basics, it’s time to develop your buyer personas. This takes a few more steps:

  • Research

After you’ve put together a basic profile of your ideal customer, you can begin to do more detailed research to create specific, well-defined personas.

You can do this through traditional market research and by speaking to current customers. You can also send out a survey, add one to your website, or email a questionnaire to your customers and ask them for their answers.

There are many different ways to gather more detailed data on your buyers, including through website analytics, social media, and even talking with your employees or sales team. Utilizing different methods can give you a better snapshot of your customers.

  • Identify problems

You’ve already thought about your customer’s challenges, but now you can delve deeper to identify their specific problems. Ask the customers that you survey what the problem was that led them to use your product or service.

Come up with a list of specific scenarios, and you might be surprised by what the answers to this question reveal. It can give you new ideas for marketing your product and targeting those various personas.

Putting Your Buyer Personas to Work

Once you’ve researched and created your buyer personas, it’s time to put them to work. Share them with your sales and marketing teams so that they can identify the best ways to answer buyer’s questions.

Once you know exactly who you’re targeting, you can tailor your messaging for them. You may come up with a few slightly different messages and marketing tactics to attract those various personas. Just be sure to keep your brand’s language the same, only tweaking the specifics to best suit individual personas.

Buyer personas can be your guide when developing your marketing plan going forward. They give you a much greater understanding of your customers, as well as a clearer view of just how your product can best serve their needs.

We can help you build your buyer persona and achieve your digital marketing goals. Contact us today!