Do you want to reach your audience in an assertive way? Then you need to know it well. Read and learn how to elaborate your business’ buyer persona!
For a digital campaign to reach more people and bring the results you want, you need to know its target audience well. However, contrary to what you are probably thinking, we’re not talking about focusing on just one target audience, but about creating personas.
Considering the high competition in the current market, it’s evident the necessity of having the client as the center of a company’s actions. Which means nothing should be done without observing the clients’ impressions, feelings, preferences, needs or wishes.
Do you want to reach your audience in an assertive way? Then you need to know it well. Read and learn how to elaborate your business’ buyer persona!
Contents
What is a buyer persona?
The buyer persona is a semi-fictional character created to help a company get to know better the clients and their needs. It’s a representation of the ideal consumer, that’s based on analysis of real data and on market research, and not in suppositions.
More than that, a persona is formed through a series of personal information about the public it wants to reach, such as:
- Most recurring age
- Professional formation
- Job
- Rent
- City where they live
- Habits
- Social media they use and what they do on it
- Life goals
- Problems
- Hobbies and preferences about any issue that’s relevant to the brand
This way, we give more value to the speech’s coherence and to the humanization, but perhaps you’re asking yourself what does this persona do? The answer is simple: to direct in the best way the content of your digital marketing strategy.
With the persona it gets easier to create posts for social media, create ebooks, texts for blogs and email marketing with specific and relevant issues, that have value with the public.
Meanwhile, be careful, don’t confuse buyer persona with target audience. In both concepts, we find information about the possible clients of a company, which ends up confusing people a little.
What’s the difference between persona and target audience?
While target audience, in a general way, represents an abrangent part of society to whom the business dedicates its efforts, products or services, a buyer persona stands out because it’s more restrictive, detailed and objective.
When you define the target audience of a company, we find information such as gender, social class, age, education, locality, income and maybe goals. With the persona, we find all this information in a kind of profile. Read the example:
- Luisa is 20 years old, is single, lives in Lisbon and studies publicity. She’s an intern in a small agency, loves fashion and dresses really well. She uses Facebook and Instagram a lot, follows blogs and digital influencers that talk about fashion and lifestyle. Her goal is to learn more about the fashion world, to create a blog and become a reference in the theme. Her problems are low income and not having knowledge about digital marketing
Now it got easier to understand the difference between both concepts, right? To create your company’s persona means being able to relate in a more effective and positive way with the clients because you’ll start communicating with them in the most correct way, at the right moments and you’ll have more hypothesis of obtaining good results.
Remember: knowledge is power! By knowing your consumer profile, your company will have the following advantages:
- The specific and assertive tone when writing
- Targeting of efforts and content
- Ability to solve the clients’ needs and wishes
- Conditions to trace better the content marketing strategies
- Discernment of where, when and what should be forwarded to the client.
How to create personas?
The main rule to create persons is to avoid guessings. For your character to have the real profile of the ideal client, you can’t make up stories based on guesses, but instead, work with real information and methodologies.
The ideal is to invest in studies, interviews, and collections of data applied directly on clients and prospects. For that, your company can use quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic research techniques.
The most efficient way to know the client it through interviews. Therefore, make forms with investigative questions and apply it on your clients to create the persona based on that. In case you still don’t have any clients, you can make online interviews that, even if they aren’t as effective, they also work.
To start planning and organizing the interview is fundamental to choose the right questions. See some important themes that can be addressed:
- Work: ask about the client’s job position, what he does, how is his routine, which are the necessary abilities and which tools he uses daily
- Company: ask about the segment and the size of the company they work in
- Goals: get to know which are the responsibilities, main goals and what is it like to be successful on the job for the client
- Challenges: ask about the biggest challenges they face at work and which are the biggest problems they have to reach their goals
- Information and content: ask how do they do to keep up to date with new abilities and knowledge for their job, which blogs they follow, in which social networks they are present and how much do they use it
- Personal information: ask your client to make a small personal history (name, age, nationality, civil status, and children) and to share some educational information and their professional path
- Consumer habits: ask where they are used to shop most of the time (whether is online or physical store), with which frequency do they buy online if they prefer searching before buying and ask the clients to tell you about their last purchase.
After the interviews, try to find common points between the clients, whether it’s characteristics, problems, goals, solutions and other common answers. Identify details that indicate that these people present a similar way to look for content.
Next, compose the personas and decide which are the most important ones. There’s not a maximum number, but know that the correct is that they all are part of your strategy.
At last, with the creation of the personas, it’s possible to execute the actions of a marketing strategy in a way that’s more direct and focused on people that are important for the business. After all, because they presented the exact characteristics of real consumers, they allow you to predict and satisfy a public that, in fact, would have interest in the product or service of the brand.
Now that you know how to create personas, what do you think about learning how to gain money selling digital products online?