If you cannot pinpoint who you are selling to, you also probably cannot effectively sell to them. The digital age has blessed us with the power of targeted marketing. However, unless you know the right target audience, even the best marketing communication will be ineffective.
So what is the most efficient way to understand your ideal customers? Simple, create fictional characters around them!
Better known as buyer personas, detailed and accurate fictional “avatars” of your ideal customers can help you better understand what they need.
In this article, we are going to understand exactly how buyer personas are created. But before that, let’s understand why they are so important.
How Do Buyer Personas Help?
Buyer personas are meant to help marketing professionals and businesses understand exactly who they are targeting. This helps them:
- Position their product/service in a way that appeals to their most ideal prospects
- Create marketing communication that their most ideal prospects can relate to
- Create the right content to educate and inform their prospects and customers about the things that actually matter to them
In short, buyer personas will help you make your business relevant to the right people. Whatever you are creating, a landing page, a complete social media campaign, with better targeting, you will see better results.
For this reason, the “fictional” personas are based on real individuals (usually existing customers) and are derived after conducting in-depth research.
Let us understand how that is done.
How To Create A Buyer Persona
As mentioned earlier, buyer personas are created based on extensive research. Since they are based on real individuals, a significant part of the research is asking questions to your existing customers/leads/prospects or potential prospects.
Before we understand how to identify the individuals for your research, let us first understand the questions that will help you create a persona:
Asking The Right Questions
Demographic Defining Questions
Basic questions that will help you understand the most basic information about your prospects. Some of the questions that fall in this category are:
- Where do you live?
- How old are you?
- What is your occupation?
- Are you married?
- What is you highest educational qualification?
Personal Life And Background Related Questions
These questions, if used properly, can provide insight into the family dynamics, decision-making processes, and individual preferences of your ideal buyer. Here are some general examples:
- How many members are there in your family?
- Who is the decision maker in your family?
- Do you have children? How many? Boys or girls?
- Do you exercise?
- Are you interested/involved in politics?
- What is your 5-year goal?
The list goes on. Keep in mind, this is where you can include niche specific questions. For instance, for a fitness supplement brand, “do you exercise?” is extremely relevant. The same brand can add questions about their preferred workout discipline or sport, about the intensity or frequency of their training, about their training goals and much more.
Career Related Questions
This section is the most important for B2B businesses. Understanding the role, responsibilities, and most importantly, the freedom they have to make purchase decisions will help you tailor your marketing strategies to reach out to the right prospects, at the right time:
- What is your role at your current organization?
- How long have you been associated with this organization?
- What are your responsibilities at your current job?
- What is your typical workday like?
- What is your biggest challenge at work?
- Who do you report to?
Once again, these questions can be customized to align with your niche.
Purchase Behavior Defining Questions
The importance of these questions is pretty self-explanatory. These questions will enable you to create marketing collaterals that resonate with the purchase decision-making process of your ideal prospects.
- Do you use social media to research before making a purchase?
- Do you shop online often?
- How do you prefer paying for your online purchases?
- How do you conduct research before making a purchase?
- How often do you use your smartphone to conduct product research?
- How do you prefer learning about new products?
- Which is your preferred search engine?
Understanding the way your ideal prospects obtain information, along with their preferred content formats and devices will help you reach out to them where it matters the most.
Finance Related Questions
These questions will help you understand the purchase abilities of your target audience. With this knowledge, you can either rethink your pricing strategy or your targeting strategy, depending on your business goals.
- What is your yearly income?
- Would you say you are impulsive with your purchase decisions?
- What was the last thing you purchased online?
- Are you the financial decision maker at your house/organization?
- How do you feel about your current spending habits?
Most of these categories can be filled with questions that directly relate to your product or the problems it aims to solve for your prospects.
This list is not exhaustive by any standard. Feel free to add as many questions as you need to establish a thorough understanding of how your ideal customer thinks and shops.
After we have understood the questions we need to ask, let’s get down to the actual research.
Conduct Online Research
While this may seem like a task to some, and unethical to others, doing research on individuals on social media is probably the most efficient way to obtain the most basic information about your prospects.
Moreover, if you have prepared a 100-question list to ask from potential prospects, you can probably answer at least 25% of those questions yourself, with the information you source from their social profiles.
Nobody has time to answer 100 questions, so this research will make life easier for them, and for you.
The simplest way to go about this is to identify your best existing customers, tracking them across social media platforms, websites, and publications, and start taking notes.
If you don’t have any existing customers, you can target your leads for this process. If you don’t have any leads, you can conduct research on the customers of your competitors.
Conduct Interviews
Once you have the most basic information about your potential prospects (derived from research in the previous step), you can begin contacting them for interviews.
This doesn’t need to be complicated, simply reach out to them and tell them you are conducting research that will enable you to deliver better, more relevant products/services to your audience.
While it is a simple enough request, you will find that many of your prospects simply don’t have time for a telephonic interview.
In such cases, it is a great idea to prepare a written questionnaire that you can share with them over email. By providing the freedom to fill out the questionnaire according to their own comfort, you will be improving your chances of getting a response.
Create A Persona With Available Information
Once you have answers to all (or most) of your questions, you can start using the information to create your own buyer persona. At this stage, there are buyer persona templates available online, that will enable you to present the buyer-persona information in an easy to digest format.
But there’s no “one way” to set yours up. Create a 1-page reference or a 5-page report. The format and style are up to you. You simply want a document that helps you target your prospects more precisely.
Conclusion
Creating buyer personas, if done right, can help you improve the effectiveness of virtually all the processes related to customer acquisition or retention. Make sure your team understands and remember these buyer personas thoroughly, so that they can direct their efforts to drive maximum efficiency.
About the Author: Vaibhav Kakkar is co-founder of DWS and RankWatch, both global brands in the marketing domain. He has been in the marketing industry for over a decade, and recently sold his UK-based agency ‘Digital Next’ to a Swedish listed company and handed over the role of CEO to a partner.
