Businesses need customers.

It’s just a simple truth. Without customers to buy from you, it’s impossible to make any sales. And with no sales, there’s no money, which means you’re not a business. Or at least you won’t be a business for long.

This is why almost every decision in business is about appealing to as many customers as possible, as this increases the chances of making more sales. And the best way to ensure you’re attracting the most customers is by understanding their wants, needs, desires, and pain points. This is where buyer personas come in.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

Also called marketing, audience, or customer personas, a buyer persona is a data-driven profile that describes the ideal customer from within your target market. A buyer persona depicts who they are, what they do, where they come from, and their decision-making process.

Once you have an understanding of who you want to sell to, it’s easier to appeal to them by tailoring all brand messaging and content specifically for them. By gaining research-based insights into your existing customers, you could also learn how best to encourage prospective customers in your target audience to start engaging with your brand. That’s why creating buyer personas is important.

Why Your Business Should Have Buyer Personas

Knowing the persona of your target audience is one of the most important things a brand can do. That’s because buyer personas help you ensure everything involved with attracting, acquiring, and retaining your customers is tailored specifically to their needs. Here are just a few of the reasons why efforts to clarify buyer personas are critical to your business success.

Brand

Buyer personas should do more than just align with your branding; they should be right at the very heart of your brand. By seamlessly integrating buyer personas into your brand, you’ll create a huge advantage over the competition. Again, this is because seeing from your customer’s perspective is crucial.

Targeting

Creating buyer personas and allowing them to guide content marketing strategies will ensure you’re focused on their needs. Not only does this result in engagement with your audience, but targeted campaigns also have the highest chance of transforming them into loyal and long-term customers.

Content

When it comes to highly targeted content for marketing purposes, understanding buyer personas will ensure you deliver relevant copy that will be the most valuable for your audience. As such, creating buyer personas in your content marketing strategy is crucial for success.

Marketing

Accurate and thoroughly researched buyer personas can be used to help focus on your marketing efforts. They can identify keyword searches for targeted SEO strategies, help make informed marketing decisions, and ensure advertising dollars are invested in targeting audiences most likely to become buyers.

UX & Web

Buyer personas are also important for UX and aspects of web design. This is because knowing who the end-users of your website are will ultimately inform how it is designed. This is exactly why the integration of buyer personas into the web development and UX design process is so vital.

Benefits Of Updating Buyer Personas

Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy! The landscapes of business are always in a state of constant change and fluctuation. Businesses change, markets shift, corporations merge, demographics alter, and audiences start looking elsewhere.

So when things eventually do change, the buyer personas that once attracted customers in droves and helped your business become successful are suddenly outdated and basically worthless. This is because buyer personas are only ever effective when they’re accurate.

To ensure all your digital marketing content is targeted accurately, updating buyer personas regularly should always be part of your strategy. As such, take the time to revisit your buyer personas after any big changes or at least once a year to confirm they still fit in with your target audience.

Different Types Of Content For Buyer Personas

It’s pretty common for businesses to have multiple buyer personas. So, depending on the size of your business, you will probably have more than one buyer persona. It’s a good idea to start small when you’re new to the idea of buyer personas, as you want to make sure the ones you create are accurate. Besides, you can always develop some more buyer personas later as needed.

You should consider a full range of content types, to suit different buyer personas. Here are a few examples:

  • Website copy: Your website copy should be search engine optimised, including plenty of keywords tailored to your audience.
  • Blogs: Articles that help you to establish trust from your audience, providing insightful information that is backed by fact. 
  • eBooks: Longer than blogs, usually 2000 words+ and contain detailed information that helps educate potential customers, adding value to your brand.
  • EDMs: A powerful way to communicate with your audience, and build a relationship; also an easy way to offer deals and track engagement.
  • Social Media posts: Has the biggest potential reach of all marketing methods – over 1.88 billion people around the world use Facebook daily – giving you global access to people.
  • Videos: Enhances the presentation of products and services – high-quality films make your brand appear both informative and entertaining. 

In order to fully understand your customers, you need to define the content preferences of each persona for your ideal buyers. There will often be different criteria for how they’ll evaluate your product, so you will need to have different strategies for how to address the individual needs of each buyer. This may look like this:

  • What are their preferred channels?
  • Which social media do they use?
  • What type of content engages them?
  • What format do they like? Long-form or short-form text? Images or video?
  • Where do they get their information?
  • Where do they spend time online?

How To Create A Buyer Persona

The following are just some of the most common buyer persona examples which define elements of how to write a buyer persona. You might not need to answer them all. Or you might want to answer some that aren’t listed. Just remember that the more questions you answer about your target audience, the more comprehensive your buyer persona template will be. And ideally, you want to have data on your customers that is actionable.

  • What are their needs?
  • What is their typical background?
  • Where do they live?
  • What are their demographics?
  • What are their interests?
  • What is their education level?
  • What career are they in?
  • How much do they earn?
  • What is their relationship status?
  • What nationality are they?
  • What languages do they speak?
  • Why would they buy your products?
  • Why might they avoid your products?

The Last Word

Now that you understand what’s involved with buyer persona research, you can start producing content personalised for your audience. Just remember, with the right match, buyer personas will help generate high-quality leads, grow your customer base, and boost the profits of your business. And in business, that’s the bottom line.