Creating a Buyer Persona – Digital Marketing Strategy

Creating a buyer persona can be a great driving force behind generating the right kind of traffic to your website or blog.

A buyer persona is different to a target market, it is more focused and defined. A buyer persona highlights a small number of individuals rather than a set or group of people to focus your marketing efforts on.

The goal is to work out how your website or brand is perceived by the outside world, who your content is targeted towards and how to leverage that information to create conversions for your business.

By creating a buyer persona and tailoring your marketing effort you will increase positive engagement and attract quality leads from people who hold an active interest in your product.

Factors that you should Include in your Buyer Persona:

1. Geographic Location
2. Age
3. Gender
4. Income
5. Job role, responsibilities and decision-making power

A buyer or customer persona is more in-depth than a target audience because it allows you to focus in on customer behaviour and habits. You effectively create an imaginary person that symbolises your ideal customer.

The Benefits of Creating and Using a Customer Persona is the Ability to Create:

• Targeted marketing
• Insight into customer behaviour
• Targeted content creation
• Targeted social media content
• Focus to create company growth and conversion

How can Creating a Buyer Persona Help with your Marketing?

At a very basic level, buyer personas allow you to create content and tailor it to a specific market. It allows you to personalise your marketing message and gear it specifically at your ideal customer(s) rather than creating a broad marketing strategy.

How do you Create a Buyer Persona?

• Look through your contacts and evaluate trends in your existing customers
• Collect data on your customers through online forms
• Talk to sales representatives to highlight trends in customer interest
• Use social media to gauge product interest
• Interview customers that already use your products and services

Once you have collected your data for the creation of the buyer persona you can set about producing the document.

Organise your research in the spreadsheet to allow you to highlight trends.

Once all of your data is organised in the spreadsheet start removing records that are unique and have no matches.

Keep narrowing down the data until you are left with a very focused group. You can then use this group to define your buyer persona buy collecting the most common data traits.

Buyer Persona Example:

Name: Sample

Background Details:

• Job in HR
• Worked in the same company for 10 years
• Married
• Income: £35,000

Demographics:

• Female
• Age – 30-40
• Location – London

Communications:

• Has an assistant or help desk screening phone calls
• Receives mail directly
• Spends less than 1 hour per day on social media

Decision Making:

• Checks google reviews
• Always checks a company’s social media account before getting in touch
• Values reliability and customer service over cost

Preferred Contact:

• Email
• Phone

Now that you have created your buyer persona it is time to put it to work. You are now able to focus your marketing effort at this persona rather than at a “target market”. Write content that would appeal to this customer and target them with social media posts. Your content will still be seen and be accessible by other customers, but it will connect directly to people within your persona group allowing you to build trust and interest.