What is an “Audience Persona? or a buyer persona”?
Well, in theoretical terms, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
In the real world, personas mean an audience that already exists, whom you know well and who already engage with your products and services. It’s a brief about whom you’re targeting and why, and specifically what your company has to offer these target customers.
It takes a lot of labor and time to research and develop these profiles, but most marketers believe that thorough Research of their target audiences dramatically boosts campaign ROI.
If you’ve no idea about your target audience, it will become difficult to connect, build a relationship and attract potential leads for your business?
Marketers are in dire need of personas to channelize their efforts and find their specific niche of customers.
BASIC REQUIREMENTS FOR BUYER PERSONAS
In case you’ve just started with personas, you need to understand the basics. These are the principle information that you must know about your target audience:
Simple background information—like age, gender, income bracket, job title, and location.
Goals— why do they need your products and services; what aim do they have? What are they trying to achieve personally or professionally?
Roadblocks— Why are they hesitating; what obstacles do you’ve to address and resolve with your marketing?
These are the fundamental aspects that you must know about your potential audience. Just identifying these three factors of your buyers, your business can create a significant impact on how it approaches with its content marketing, advertising and sales strategies.
Here’s how HubSpot creates its buyer’s persona:
TAKING BUYER PERSONAS TO THE NEXT LEVEL
The idea of buyer personas is not something very new. These days even banks are using – ‘Know Your Customer’ mantra!
As more digital marketing teams put collective efforts and time into persona-creation, it’s becoming more competitive to micro-target the customers.
In other terms, you may need to keep on updating the personas you’ve created a few years back! You might need to dig a little deep to create a remarkable buyer’s persona and stay active in your niche.
Let’s get started with these four more advanced persona features:
1) Add a picture and a name:
Indeed, it sounds a bit cheesy, but adding a photo and a name to your persona feels more authentic and reminds you of running the campaign to connect to the actual humans.
2) Pay attention to “pain points”:
Pain points are the issues your persona needs to get resolved; this is the reason why they are looking for a solution.
3) Analyze your persona’s online behaviors:
What’s your approach to finding information? Where do you most likely encounter your customers online? It is a simple yet very effective way to know which social channels to focus on for your digital campaigns.
In-Depth Research on customers’ online behavior, you might also discover the best way to follow-up with your new leads. What do they prefer: phone calls, online chat, email? What time should you contact them? You’ve to take care of all the valuable information that will save your time, money, and efforts in between your sales cycle.
4) Create a mini-story around your persona:
Turn those bullet points about their desires, goals, pain points, and search process into a short storytelling narrative. Represent it as “a day in the life” of your key audience.
5) Final Tip:
While creating your personas, don’t fill your list with superfluous details. While it’s essential to know your target audience thoroughly, it can also lead you to include all sort of irrelevant data about them.
To stick with the data that’s essential for your business objectives. And stay in constant touch with your customers! Ask them what they need. Listen patiently to their feedbacks.
To Sum up,
Creating a buyer persona helps a business direct its marketing efforts towards its relevant audience.
Because, in the end, it’s all about ROI.
A buyer persona helps marketers achieve their marketing goals providing useful targeting scope.
We would love to hear from you about your strategies in developing an effective audience persona for tour business.