“What is my target customer like? How do I know who to go after?” If your a business owner, you probably have asked yourself these questions a lot. It all comes down to one basic tactic, creating a buyer persona. In this article, we will cover how to create a buyer persona to target your desired audience more efficiently and also touch on how utilizing this strategy will improve your MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) and COA (Cost of Acquisition) numbers. A buyer persona is similar to a personal profile of your ideal target audience. It contains personal information, demographics, pain points, goals, credit history, and more. It is more specific than your typical target audience mockup. Diving into a deeper, more detailed buyer persona will help you narrow down your scope of work.
Let’s talk numbers real quick to better illustrate the importance of buyer personas. For instance, 70% of companies miss out by not fully utilizing buyer personas. You can also leverage your buyers personas to dramatically increase your MQL. Optimize your COA along with your buyers pain points to persuade more needs to click. 56% of businesses will generate a higher MQL while utilizing these tactics.
Diving further into percentages let’s discuss the effect of a buyer persona in numbers. 71% of companies with a documented persona exceed revenue and lead goals. 56% of companies who use personas create higher quality leads. 90% of companies using personas have a clear understanding of who their buyers are. Lastly, 210% increase in website traffic along with 124% increase in sales generated through websites.
There are plenty of tools that you can use in order to create these buyer personas, and there are branding experts that are here to help along the way as well. A few tools that I recommend would have to be HubSpot Userforge and then just free templates you find through Google searches. HubSpot has a service that is called “Make My Persona” which outlines a step-by-step guide to make a persona. Userforge is a similar product, but they offer more features such as photo uploading story templates, a free demo and more. As for the free templates, there are many that you can find online if the bells and whistles seem unnecessary.
Let’s just quickly go over a brief step-by-step on how you would go about creating a buyer persona for your company. First, you would want to start with research, you’ll want to talk to customer facing employees, talk to your clients, and determine where your competition is seeing success. Next, you will want to adjust and tune. Organize your buyer personas and segment your buyer personas. then, you’ll want to create a name and story. Who is your buyer persona? Give yourself a full profile to work with. The next step would be to focus on roles, goals, and challenges. Lastly, you will want to utilize your buyer personas. Use your buyer personas to craft tailored digital marketing and sales strategies.
Now that we’ve briefly gone over these five steps let’s dive into each of them a little bit more. Starting with researching, you’ll want to take this time to narrow down your questions until similar answers are given by anyone in that target audience. These questions you can ask your employees and even your clients. This step is going to be the most important because it’s also when you do research on where your competition is seeing success. Staying in the know and on top of your game in the marketing world is one of the most important assets you have. This research can also be used in many other aspects of your marketing.
Let’s jump into the adjust and tuning phase of your buyer persona. This is where you take the buyer personas that you have and you start to organize them and sift through them to categorize each one. You also segment your buyer personas. This will help to create a larger target audience while keeping your sites narrowed. Moving personas into categories will also make it easier to apply them to new marketing strategies.
Our next step would be to create a name and a story. This is where you get to have a little bit of fun with the buyer persona. You get to determine the age, the demographic, the pain points, goals, credit history and such. A basic profile typically includes name, age, those pain points, interests, common objections, demographics, and goals and motivations. This is a good springboard to use and then feel free to add more categories with more details. The more detailed you get with your buyer’s persona the more accurate and efficient your marketing will be.
This fourth step is fairly self-explanatory. This is when we want to focus our buyer persona. You really want to focus on those roles, goals, and challenges. Really think on what those might be and be sure to utilize the steps prior especially the research phase. If you aren’t comfortable with the focus step at this moment then feel free to repeat steps one, two, and three as those will help you with step four.
Lastly, we have step five. This is when you take all your preparation and your work and utilize it. Use this research and this buyer persona in order to more accurately market towards your desired audience. Your buyer persona is something that you can use in every aspect of marketing. Content writing, visual design, and it can also be used to determine what platforms you will want to mark it on along with so much more.
Now I want to state, again, that this is just a brief summary of what a buyer persona is and how to create and utilize them. The programs that are out there are made specifically for this purpose and I highly recommend them if you are interested in buyer personas. HubSpot is always a good recommendation, but Userforge is more specifically developed for this task. Being able to upload photos, create the stories from templates and also using a free demo are just some of the advantages to going with Userforge. There’s always the option of going with the free templates that you can just search up on Google but it may require a little bit more effort on your part. Hootsuite also has a great article about creating buyer persona’s that I found to be very helpful when I started out.
Utilizing buyer personas effectively can help you too more easily map out content, maintain cohesion among your organization during the marketing process, and also helps your organization better utilize its time by eliminating guesswork. Your marketing plan should feel more direct and personalized to your target audience. This will help to attract the most valuable customers. This is a visual for the who, what, when, where, and why that your team can use in order to generate a unique marketing experience aimed at your customers.
Once you are able to develop your buyer personas you can then use fictional scenarios to help with marketing strategies. These buyer personas and scenarios can be combined to determine what your marketing should cover. For instance, let’s say one of your buyer personas happens to be a mother with children in school and the scenario might be the first day of school. You can use info from both of these to then develop a highly accurate targeted marketing campaign towards your desired audience.
Through this article we were able to touch on each basic point when it comes to creating your buyer personas and what those are. Now, I highly recommend conducting your own research to help determine if this might be a concept you would like to explore. As I have researched this topic, I have come to understand the importance of buyer personas and how they can be used as extremely beneficial assets for any marketing campaign.
This may sound like a new concept to many, but the programs that are available have many tools to help the process and make it easy for anyone to use or understand. There are tools that record your research notes alongside your personal data, you can role play scenarios, and work from templates to create unique and highly detailed users which then use segments and categorize which then can be utilized among current and future campaigns. Most of the sites that have buyer persona tools offer business packages that you can share among your team so that everybody has access to create or look up buyer personas and utilize them.
I understand that this is not a new concept by any means but I am shocked at how little it is utilized while the numbers are what they are. I’ll be honest as well that I was not aware of buyer personas and how useful they can be while developing a marketing campaign. This is something that I plan to dive further into and possibly utilize in my future projects.