Importance of Creating Audience or Buyer Personas for Your Business

A ‘target audience’ is just a word. It’s the buyer persona that breathes life into it. A wide target audience can lead to a wastage of resources. A buyer persona helps you narrow it down and engage with potential customers that have a high tendency to convert. Did you know? About 93% of organizations which outdo lead and revenue goals split their database by buyer persona.

Creating a buyer persona might sound intimidating but it’s not. The first step is to understand what a buyer persona is? Then we will dive deep and understand its benefits and learn how to create one.

 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona, also known as Audience Persona and Marketing Persona, is a semi-fictional and detailed explanation of a representative from your target audience. The description is based on market research and current customer data.

A buyer persona has details like a name, demographic details, behavioral traits and interests. It needs to look like a real person. You can also give it a photograph to make it more convincing. It will also help you understand the pain points, goals and buying patterns of your target audience.

There is also a negative buyer persona. It has details of people you don’t want to target. For example, you deal in real estate. Targeting college students won’t be a good idea as buying a property won’t be one of their priorities for now. This is one example of a negative buyer persona.

A buyer persona is not a fad. It’s not something companies invest in to make their marketing strategy look fancy. It does real work! It will help you keep the voice and direction of your efforts consistent, from social media to product development and client servicing.

As per Mark W. Schaefer, 90% of a company’s sales are usually driven by 3-4 personas.

There are numerous benefits of creating buyer personas. Let’s discuss some of them.

Importance of Creating Audience/ Buyer Personas

Buyer personas can be helpful to various departments of your company. From delivering personalized content to dealing with customer grievances, it can be a game-changer.

Personalization all the way

There is a lot of clutter on the web. It is difficult to gain the attention of the customers more than ever. This is where personalization can give your brand an edge.  A buyer persona can help marketers customize messages that will attract the target audience. In fact, if you know the demographics, interests and behavior patterns of your target audience, it can help you run targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. It will lead to less wastage of the precious marketing budget.

Emails can also be personalized for attracting the target audience and engaging them. Personalized emails can increase the click-through rate by 14%, drive 18 times more revenue and improve the conversion rate by 10% as compared to broadcast emails.

Less Wastage of Marketing Dollars

By targeting your product to the right people, you don’t only engage your target audience but also save money by not interacting with people who won’t be interested in your brand. Remember negative buyer personas? A brand that sells leather products will waste its money by showing ads to a vegan.

It can also help you within your company. For example, you have products segmented based on the spending capacity of your customers. So, a customer who has less disposable income may not be interested in your premium offerings.

Buyer persona allows you to interact with the right people at the right time and place. It means more qualified leads for your business.

Did you know? Ads based on behaviors as two times more effective than generic ads.

More Sales for Your Business

By using buyer personas, you’ll be targeting people who are interested in your offerings. You’ll be able to deliver tailored experiences as you know what your customers will like and make them stick. Your brand will be able to build a personal connection with the customers which will make them feel special and valued.

How to Create a Buyer/Audience Persona?

A buyer persona is an amalgamation of facts and fiction sourced from your customers and the market. The qualitative details are usually based on data. Here is the simple process you can use to create a buyer’s persona.

Select a template of a buyer persona that you want to use for your business.

Add demographic information like name, age, location, family status, interests, etc. You can use tools like Google Analytics for sourcing this data. It will give you the information of people who are already engaging with your brand. You can also consider who your competitors are targeting.

The next step is to understand the pain points and motivations of your customers. You can do this by interviewing your customers or potential customers. By understanding their pain points, you’ll be able to provide solutions in the form of your products and services. You can plug in your brand easily if you know what motivates your customers.

Now is the time to understand your role in all of this. You need to analyze how your product can help your customers. Think of the benefits (not just features) your product has. By this means, you can communicate to your customers how your product can add value to their life and make it easy.  

We have come far from the time when ‘one size fits all’ was the norm considering the cost of advertisements and placements (magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc.). We live in the time of ‘Big Data’, and we know more about our customers than we ever did. It is now possible to target ads on a much granular level by segmenting data as per the buyer personas a company uses.

It may seem easy to create a buyer persona but it needs a lot of time, effort and understanding of the market. There is a lot of data on the Internet, but all of it is not useful. It takes a seasoned mind to segment and use the data in the best way possible. If you find it challenging to create one for your brand, feel free to get in touch with us so that we can guide you through the process.