When you’re marketing your product and/or service, the hard truth you need to learn is that what you have to offer isn’t for everyone. Your instinct is always going to be to cast a wide net and haul in everything you can, but that’s not the best strategy. Effective marketing is more specialized and nuanced. In sticking with the previous metaphor, it’s less about casting a huge net, and more about using specialized bait to finally nab the massive client/fish of your dreams.
Buyer personas are idealized versions of your prospects that you create with your team in order to focus your marketing efforts and boost your conversion rates. They’re a kind of blueprint you’ll use to ensure that your promotional materials are aimed in the right direction for maximum success.
How can you create buyer personas for your organization? Here are our tips!
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Gather Your Information
First things first, you need to find your audience. This is accomplished by diving into your own data and by collecting data from readily available resources on the web. You’re looking for basic details like age, location, and interests, but you’re also trying to get a little more in-depth. How large is the business you’re marketing to, and who makes the buying decisions? What kind of challenges are they facing? If you can identify these factors, you can create posts and articles that speak to those challenges.
Try and discern where your ideal buyer is at in life. Are they young, career-driven 20-something professionals, or are they in their mid-thirties trying to juggle work life and family time? What do they do for fun? What motivates them? These are important things to know!
Also, be sure and check to see who your competition is targeting, as it can give you good insight with minimal effort on your part. In fact, if you want to take a peek at exactly what your competition is saying and who they’re saying it to, we include a service that does just that with your SalesLabX subscription! Learn more about SLX Market Insights.
Find Where You Align
When you think about your ideal buyer, you want to think about what they could gain from you. What are their specific goals for their organization? What problems are they facing that you can help with? This is going to become part of the profile you’re building.
You don’t have to solve their every problem to resonate with them as a buyer! You just need to show that you understand. Utilize your empathy and use it to strike a chord. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal buyer, and then figure out what you need. Talk to the people on your sales team, and ask them what questions people ask. See what kind of pain points those prospects are experiencing. That’s going to be an excellent source of marketing content and key to building your buyer personas.
Build the Perfect Buyer
Once you’ve gathered enough relevant information about your buyer’s demographic, needs, and pain points, it’s time to put it all together into something tangible. Let’s get building!
You may think that the trick to this is to be vague, but once again, specificity is better. How specific? You want to give your buyer persona a name, age, real-life interests, and a backstory. How much do they make in a year? What TV shows do they enjoy watching? What are their goals and fears? Find a picture that represents your buyer from your preferred stock photo site. All of this should go into the buyer profile. The more complete a picture you can build, the more effective you can create media for your target audience.
Now your buyer has a name and a face. They have a life! You can look at them, and using your data and what you know about your industry, you can create effective content for them specifically that will catch the attention of others in adjacent demographics, upping your chances at conversion.
