Understanding Buyer Personas
It might seem obvious, but if you want your brand to resonate with your target audience, you need to start by spelling out who that audience is in the first place. Whether you’re targeting businesses (B2B) or individual consumers (DTC), developing strong buyer personas before diving into your marketing strategy will set you up for success.
What are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customer. They embody the end-user’s motivations, aspirations, pain points, and behaviors – giving your company a clearer sense of why your brand matters to the target audience. Creating these personas will help you be more intentional with your marketing efforts, and will be far more effective than trying to appeal to everyone at once.
By taking the time to understand what drives your target audience’s behavior, your business can create a more impactful marketing plan that resonates with the end-user and drives results.
How Do You Build Them Out?
Creating a buyer persona involves collecting information about your ideal customers so that you can build out detailed profiles that represent different segments of your audience. The broad strokes include:
- Research + data collection
- Analysis of existing customers
- Assessment of patterns, trends, and segments
- Persona creation (this should live as a live document that you and your team can easily refer to!)
- Continual refinement and validation
What Do I Need to Get Started?
Building out buyer personas might feel like a big to-do, but there are a few ways you can make the process less daunting. Here are some tips to get you started:
- Ask around: Tools like SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, or Typeform can help you gather data from your existing and prospective audience. Analyze the data for any patterns and common threads that might help offer a better understanding of your end-user.
- Follow a template: No need to reinvent the wheel! There are some great templates out there (Hubspot, Miro, Xtensio) that you can use to help keep your buyer personas consistent and organized.
- Do a little stalking: No not the creepy kind – we mean analytics. Social media insights and Google Analytics are incredible tools that can tell you a lot about your audience. Make sure you take advantage of it!
It’s important to remember that buyer personas are not set in stone. They should continue to evolve with your audience, and improve as you get to know them better. Make it a point to regularly update and refine them so that your buyer personas continue to be an accurate representation of your ideal audience.
