Personas are an important marketing tool used to develop and understand your target audience.
They lead to greater user engagement and loyalty.
Using personas can make your marketing scheme more effective, easier and quicker.
A buyer persona or reader profile is a portrayal of what your intended target audience symbolizes.
Buyer personas
These personas can be anywhere from a few short sentences to pages of detailed material.
They are researched based and represent the who, what, why as to buyers decisions.
Personas are important
The need for a buying persona as a marketing tool is crucial to narrowing down your target audience.
It also helps you when brainstorming ideas for topics.
Specifically knowing who your target audience is makes it easier to develop topics based on their needs and interests.
A buyer persona allows you to target a particular person rather than a general demographic.
Data in a Persona
- Industry, job title and responsibilities
- Preferred content formats such as blog posts, slides, podcasts, infographics etc.
- Technical expertise and level of experience
- If relevant information like age, nationality or gender
- Preferred style of communication
- Preferred sources of information such as media networks or blogs etc.
- Questions they are asking about challenges faced, a typical buyer’s journey and common objections
Ways to gather data
You can interview your customers and use this information to create customer case studies or post success stories to your website.
Another method is to send out a survey to gather the data you need.
Use analytics which provide a template of general audience demographics to build a persona with accuracy.
After compiling your data you can use the communalities to create a true data-based buyer persona.
The benefits of personas
Personas provide the ability to talk one-on-one instead of feeling like you are shouting to a crowd.
You will be able to find the users easier by knowing what they like and where they are located.
By using personas you will have the ability to segment your audience and find different types of ideal customers.
This will enable you to produce content to target different groups.
The downside of personas
Creating these can be costly and take very time-consuming.
You have to spend time doing research if you want accuracy in your data-base.
It can actually be detrimental to your business to spend time putting together personas during the initial stages of growth.
It’s difficult to know who your ideal personas are until you have worked with an assortment of people.
Avoid “analysis paralysis”
It is best to wait until you produce content and see what does and doesn’t get results before creating buyer personas.
You can spend too much time gathering data with complicated processes, and postpone any actual marketing.
Personas are an investment
Whether you decide to conduct surveys, sift through analytic data or personally interview clients buyer personas are worth the investment in terms of targeting a specific audience.
You will definitely benefit by putting together a data base of personas if your business has been around for a while and you have enough customers and readers from which to glean information.
If you have a general idea of who your specific audience is then working to attain buyer personas will benefit your business or blog.
Otherwise if you are just starting out and haven’t yet built up a client base and aren’t sure who you are specifically targeting a more basic persona may be useful to you.
This will take time to get your customer audience build up and to study there behavior to see how to start building out a profile .
This should be done after the first 6-8 months in business.
There are numerous tools to use to do this.
