A well-established marketing campaign begins with knowing your audience. If you don’t know who you are marketing to, your content won’t be much better than a blank slate. Buyer personas define your target audience and can be the first step toward a powerful marketing campaign.
Your buyer persona can discover the habits, history and mentality, and paint a picture of your customers. For example, a single woman in a big city, or a family man that spends his free time building tree houses and going to soccer games. A buyer persona can be summarized into three specifics.
What You Get From a Buyer Persona
- Conscious insight
- Better communication
- Greater understanding
Now that you have the insight, you can direct each article, keyword and social media post to the persona. Every consumer has five common traits. A buyer persona analyzes the following traits to identify customers.
Demographics
Demographics are quantifiable characteristics of a given population. They include age range, gender, household income and location. For example married, male and middle class. Demographic profiling provides enough information to create a mental picture of the customers.
Background
The background of customers evolve from demographics, and can be either professional or personal. A buyer persona reflects upon lifestyle, hobbies, interests and education.
Values and Goals
The customer’s priorities can be determined by their values and goals. Ask yourself what makes the customer really excited. For example, a first time tax preparer probably values educational products that are user friendly and helps them achieve their goals.
Common objectives
Once you discover your persona, you will need to find out the common objections of the sales process. A common objection is something that makes your consumer tick. Common objections includes high cost and timeliness. The marketing message evolves from efficient communication with consumers.
Day in the Life
From the demographics, background, values and goals, and common objections we determine our customer’s average day. An average day can refer to outlets where our customers can be reached. This includes print, social media channels, television, radio etc.
Reaching Your Customers
Once you know these facts, you can build the buyer persona form. There are many ways to determine your target audience. Speaking with your customers is often the most effective. If you are not able to speak with your customers, than there are many social and public outlets available. By using the following three outlets, you can be more prepared to launch your marketing campaign.
Talk to Your Existing Customers
Pick up the phone or send an email survey. You can do this through a contact page or reply from an ecommerce purchase.
Audience Jacking
Review competitor business’ customer’s profiles. Other customer profiles can be found on the business’ Facebook, Twitter or Google+ accounts. Review the customer’s posts and interests.
QuickSprout
Enter your competitor’s website into QuickSprout and you will get the most shared content. The shared content are business’ pages that customers linked to other websites. This includes blog posts, products and services.
Social sharing has become one of the most powerful marketing techniques. There are 1.4 billion Facebook users worldwide and 645,750,000 Twitter users as of June 2014. Social sharing reaches a global population. By putting your marketing on social media, you are reaching an audience of all ages.
A great buyer persona supports your marketing behavior. Sales and marketing teams are able to work more cohesively as the crucial component identifies your market. Buyer personas should not be skipped, and are investments that can improve your business sales.