Why You Should Be Developing Buyer Personas

(Hint: This is The One Time it’s Okay to Stereotype!!)

Do you know who’s buying your product? Do you know what type of home or apartment they live in, where they shop, what they like to do for fun, what their salary is?

If you don’t, you’re not connecting with your customers on the personal level today’s market demands. Your marketing strategy is missing a key component to your business success.

But it’s okay, because there’s an instant fix for this common problem: personas.

What’s a Marketing Persona?

Personas are a fictional stand-in character that represents a typical buyer of your product.

You might be thinking: but there are a lot of different people who buy my product, and you’d be correct. That’s why you need multiple personas to effectively represent your most common customers.

But making guesses about your customers won’t work either (just like stereotypes in real life). Effective personas are fact-driven and based on both qualitative and quantitative data.

How to create personas

According to Heidi Cohen, there are 3 basic ways to gather information about your customers to find and develop these personas.

1. Human interactions—this includes the sales interactions you and your sales team have with your customers, personal surveys conducted over the phone—any one-on-one communication you have with them
2. Existing data—this can be email surveys, demographic information from your CRM system, and analytics of data such as page views, time on site, open rates and more (Check out more data source ideas)
3. Social media—people who follow and interact with your business on social media can reveal a lot, from how they interact with your brand and competitors to what they expect from your products

The Right Answers Start with the Right Questions

When observing and asking your customers questions, keep the following questions in mind that can help develop your personas:

1. What do they live?
2. What’s their education level?
3. What is their income level?
4. What are their hobbies and interests?
5. Who are their influencers?
6. What is his/her job?
7. What frustrates them?
8. What are their biggest priorities and goals?
9. What is their personality like?
10. How do they spend money?
11. How do they interact with you and your competitors?
12. What do they want from you and your company?
13. What type of information do they need about your product to decide?
14. Where do they look for that information?

But most importantly, keep in mind question that directly relate to their buying habits, such as where they look for information about products, where they spend time online, and how they interact with and what they expect from a company they buy from.

How to use persona marketing

So, what do you do with these personas after you create them?

Now you can target your content directly to your customers based on their personalities, needs and style. If you’ve been asking the right questions, you have your answer to this already.

Those Elusive Millennials

For instance, Business 2 Community advices that when interacting with millennials online, save your money on traditional ads, since millennials tend to be distrustful of advertising and claim it doesn’t affect their purchasing decisions.

Instead, you would build your business around speaking specifically to these skeptics. Write transparent, valuable content that answers the questions they have, and deliver to their specific needs. Plus, now you know what not to waste time (and money!) on.

Your Free Pass to Stereotype Has One Caveat

Content Marketing Institute warns against making assumptions about your buyers, instead of basing your personas on factual data. Another common mistake is collecting irrelevant data. Gender and job description are not always the most crucial factors. The most important information about your buyer is how they reached their purchasing decision—from the moment they realized they had a problem to the moment they bought your product.

Summing up

• When thinking about your customers, don’t just rely on the assumptions you already have about them. Effective personas are based on facts and data.
• Use the data you have and find new ways collect the data you need to create accurate, useful personas
• Use your persona to create actionable content that speaks directly to your customers, in the places they go and the form they want
• Reevaluate the effectiveness of your content and accuracy of your personas regularly to determine if adjustments should be made

For more actionable insight, check the Petra Blog weekly for updates!