The Learning Center

Your buyer persona, otherwise known as your marketing persona, is an aspect of marketing many businesses overlook, usually because they think they are above doing this sort of thing. Businesses will offer a product or a service without their customer in mind and wonder why they aren’t getting a ton of business. The truth is, most products or services don’t actually sell themselves. It’s up to every business to know how to market toward the right audience, not to everyone in general. Marketing toward this right audience is knowing your buyer persona and how to use that knowledge to your benefit.

What Is Your Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on what you know about your existing customers. This information could be based on things like their demographics, gender, income, jobs, lifestyle, and goals. You can give them a name, a face, a job. A buyer persona is meant to exist to help you put yourself in your customer’s shoes and market yourself to them with their life in mind. By pinpointing these things down about who your customers are, you will be able to focus your marketing efforts on those who matter rather than waste them on those who would never even consider your business to begin with.

Why Is a Buyer Persona Important?

The goal of nailing down your buyer persona is to attract the right kinds of leads. They help you better understand your customers to be able to deliver what they want to hear. If you are marketing towards everyone, the odds of the right audience being reached go down. Knowing exactly who your audience is is critical to every piece of marketing or content you create in relation to your business, in order to get attention from the right people and maintain that attention. A buyer persona is what personalizes your marketing. It allows you to tailor your content and message in order to create different campaigns targeted towards certain personas. Depending on your product or service, you could have multiple buyer personas. Just make sure you don’t leave any out.

How To Create Your Buyer Persona

Creating your buyer persona is all about asking the right questions, doing detailed market research, and looking at data on your existing customers. With information from those three things, you can then find patterns in commonalities among everyone to create one, and sometimes more, buyer personas. Start by asking what are their motivations for buying? How old are they? Do they have a family? What’s their education level? Do they have a job and does it pay well? Your answers can mostly come from your current customers, especially if you use a platform like Facebook to market which allows you to see what types of people are interacting the most with your business. You can also use surveys and interviews to subtly figure out who it is you should be targeting. Use forms on your website that ask for specific things you might want to know about your customers.

Once you have plenty of commonalities among all of them, you can create your actual buyer persona in order to help those in your business to always target that one person. Do this by giving them a name and a face. Find a stock image of a person you think is your average customer, name them, and tell their story. When every piece of content is created, that person can then picture your buyer persona and create with them in mind rather than an obscure, broad audience.

Negative Personas Can Be Just as Helpful

Just as knowing who you want to target can benefit your marketing, knowing who not to market to can be just as good. A negative persona is the opposite of your buyer persona. These are the people you don’t want to target because they aren’t interested in buying into what you have to offer. Do you already know who will never make a purchase from your company? Do you often find that students are the ones who are looking you up the most just to get information for a school project? By knowing your negative persona, you can exclude these people specifically from your marketing campaigns or advertisements.

With research and a knowledge of your current customers, you can determine both your buyer persona as well as your negative persona. Before you take any further action marketing your product or service, delve into who you are trying to reach and not reach. The more targeted your marketing is, the more quality leads your business will receive. Put an end to wasting your marketing efforts. Find out your buyer persona who really wants you and deliver a message to them they can’t resist.