A buyer persona is a research-based profile that depicts a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face and how they make decisions,” according to Social Media Today.
When trying to build or maintain a successful business image, brand is everything. Your brand helps you control who your customers are and how they see you, therefore benefiting your business. Buyer personas can also be called marketing persona profiles and are used in order to help businesses understand their customers so that they can reach and exceed customer expectations in order to maintain a strong relationship with them.
If you’re wondering how to use buyer personas in your content marketing strategy, read on.
Why is a buyer persona important?
Buyer personas are important because they make sure businesses really know who their customers are and enable them to build an awareness of what those customers’ needs are. Customers are known to return to companies that they trust, so it is important to be one of those businesses.
Use buy personas to make customers feel heard and understood through explaining that you understand their needs as customers. You have to make sure that you are empathizing with them so that they feel that you will be able to fill their needs and leave them satisfied.
Creating a buyer persona
When creating a buyer persona, you will find you will identify so many key qualities about your customers you might not have known, which will help you going forward operating as a business. You need to figure out what your ideal customers’ qualities are and how your business can align with them. This should help you to learn more about who your customers are and who your business is built for. Buyer personas should be built out of internal and external research.
A lot of research will need to be done so that you can create the best buyer persona possible. Some good research to do includes conducting surveys of existing customers and non-customers.
Some key questions to help create your buyer persona are:
- How old are you?
- What is your gender?
- Where do you live? Where are you from?
- What is your marital status?
- What is your level of education?
- What are your goals in life?
- What is your career?
- What are your special skills?
- Do you have any children?
- What does your typical day look like?
- What drives your decision-making process?
- What are your favorite products?
- What are your hobbies and interests?
A good idea for the size of each buyer persona is that it should be about a page long for each one. This is because you may need to create a range of different personas if your company is large and has a range of services and products that it offers - not every product or service will require the same ideal customer. It’s important to remember that your ideal customers will likely change as your business evolves, especially if you are a smaller business and looking to grow rapidly.
In short, buyer personas help a business efficiently allocate resources to produce the best return on investment. If you’re an oyster seller, you don’t want to be selling your product to customers who don’t like seafood.