How To Create buyer personas
When creating content of any type for social media, whether that’s post or stories or social ads, our goal is to put ourselves into the shoes of our buyer and to really try to speak the language that gets their interest and their action. To do this, we need to understand who they are, and what makes them 'tick.'
Or, in marketing speak, we need to create buyer personas which are a fictional generalised representation of your ideal customer which will help to make it easier for you to tailor your content to the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of different groups.
Why create a buyer persona?
Creating a buyer persona for your business will help identify the ideal type of customer so you can produce effective content to sell your products, instead of blindly creating blog posts and videos hoping someone will buy from you. Creating a buyer persona starts with getting quality data to inform your views. Sources like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or other Social Listening Platforms like Sprout Social or Hubspot are all great places to start.
“If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about.”
- Nate Elliott
When you create a buyer persona profile, you aim to include things like their location, age, gender, employment, the company they work for, their role, marital status, interests, their shopping habits. Here's a good list to get you started:
Personal Background Info: includes details such as job, family, age, income, and gender
What They Want: includes their goals, kinds of challenges they’re facing, and what you can do to provide solutions
Why They Buy Your Product: lists reasons this person would buy your product, which specific problem it solves, and what holds them back from buying
How do you reach: the most convenient way to reach this customer and how you would explain your solution. This includes brand and people that they listen to.
Buyer Insight Sources
Some great buyer insight sources include:
Google Analytics: specific locations, gender, interests, and in-depth on-site insights
Social Media: to understand their interests, lifestyle and purchase behaviours
Market Research: customer surveys, interviews etc.
Creating Your Buyer Persona
Once you have obtained the key data related to your customer, you can start creating a profile to organize all of the information in one place. Depending on the industry and the type of business you have, you may have a number of buyer personas. If this is new to you, we suggest starting with just three.
You can create your buyer persona from scratch or you can use a buyer persona template to get an idea of how to create one. There are even online tools such as Xtensio’s free User Persona Creator that let you quickly create a buyer persona profile
Lifecycle Stages
Once you have researched your buyer, the next step is to consider where they are in the buying cycle (i.e. how close are they to making a purchase?). This location in the buying cycle is known as a lifecycle stage. We can keep this simple by divvying up the buying cycle into three lifecycle stages: Awareness, Consideration, & Decision.
We have helped you take the next step by creating a template which will help you work out what content you can share to help your customer through to the next stage of the lifecycle. Download our buyer persona content mapping template here.
Review, Analyse, Action
Understanding your buyer isn't a one-off activity. It's something you should be doing regularly, to get a better understanding of how your actions are impacting on your results. You would expect that when you're speaking more to your audience, you're going to get better results, so test this! See how effective you are being at adapting your content to your audience.
WRAPPING IT UP
What do you think? Are you using buyer personas to improve your content? If you're unsure where to start, drop us a line and let's chat about how we can help you #GetTonguesWagging!