Buyer Personas Demystified
Creating buyer personas is possibly THE key to successful marketing campaigns. When you successfully create a buyer persona, you personalize your ideal client. It makes them a person, not a prospect. You begin to understand how they think, identify with their life and their needs. You have insight that helps you identify with them, and then you are able to speak directly to their problem or need. This makes your message personal and meaningful to real people. When your ideal client hears your message, they stand up and say, “That’s me, they are talking to me!” The trick is to get crystal clear about your ideal client.
If you have a client base, the best way to identify your ideal client is to survey and interview your current clients.
Some questions to ask:
Who are they?
What prompted them to look into your service or product?
How long did it take them to decide to buy from you?
What steps did they take in their buyer journey?
Did they compare you to the competition?
Why did they buy from you, what was the deciding factor?
These questions will help you evaluate your current marketing message and how it compares to the competition. It helps you see the strengths and weaknesses of your campaigns, and you are equipped to continue with what is working and modify what is not.
You may ask all the above questions, and they will help you, but do not get distracted with irrelevant information. There are 3 questions about the ideal client that must be answered. The answers to these three questions will help decipher what information is important and what is not. If we simply answer these three questions, we will be equipped to create powerful messaging that speaks to our ideal client.
3 Questions to Simplify Buyer Personas
Answer these 3 questions, and the process of creating buyer personas is demystified; it becomes simple. Below, the 3 questions are listed with an illustration of how to answer them based on your product or service.
1. What are your persona’s primary priorities and responsibilities as related to your product or service?
Primary priorities and responsibilities become evident as we see how the persona spends time and money on related products and services.
For example, I am selling cosmetics and I know my ideal client is a woman. I am interested in her priorities and responsibilities that relate to cosmetic use. So I would consider:
- What does my persona do with her time and how does she prioritize her appearance and cosmetic use in her daily life?
- How much money does my persona spend on cosmetics and services to achieve or maintain an image?
2. How does your persona measure success in areas that are related to your product or service?
So, for example, there are many ways my ideal client may measure success in her life but I am concerned with how she measures success in the area of her appearance as related to cosmetics. So I would examine:
- Does my persona measure her success with cosmetics based on her ability to purchase a particular brand? What does that brand represent to her?
- Does my persona measure her success with cosmetics based on their ability to help her achieve a certain image or appearance?
- Does my persona have particular performance expectations of her cosmetics to consider them successful?
3. What is your persona’s problem or pain point that your product or service can solve?
After answering the first two questions specifically, identify the persona’s pain point.
Here is a clue: It will lie in their inability or difficulty to fulfill their priorities or responsibilities as identified in question one; or in their sense of failing to meet their own measure of success, as identified in question two. The pain point is the trigger that sends your persona on a quest for a solution, which you are equipped to solve.
Buyer Persona Profile: An Example
So with the above questions as a guide, I have determined my buyer persona profile. The example profile follows:
Priorities and Responsibilities: My buyer persona is a business woman with an office job, where her appearance is very important to her. Her priority is to look good at work.
Success Measures: My buyer persona measures success, when it comes to her appearance, by staying fresh and presentable all day long. She keeps a busy schedule and doesn’t have time to freshen her make-up during the day. Her make-up is successful if it doesn’t need touch-ups at work.
Pain Point: Her pain point is that her skin has become oily recently, and her makeup wears off after lunch and doesn’t like looking tired or worn. She knows she needs a new foundation that will last all day even on oily skin.
Create Marketing that speaks to this buyer persona
After answering the 3 questions and creating a buyer persona profile, it is time to create marketing messages that will address your identified client’s pain point directly. The point is to have messaging that is so precisely targeted that your ideal client will voluntarily self-select when she sees your content. When that happens, a sale happens, just like magic. They know your product is their solution.
So, for example, using the persona profile I created above, I will create blogs and ads that speak to her pain point. I will write content addressing how my cosmetics help her stay fresh all day at work without the need for touch-ups.
This is how effective digital marketing works with a clear buyer persona:
I write my ad: AGA Cosmetics: Finally a foundation for oily skin that works as long as you do.
I post my ad to Google Adwords.
My ideal client, the real person that identifies with my buyer persona profile, will see this ad on the internet as she is searching for cosmetics that will last all day.
She is drawn to the ad on the internet because it speaks to her pain point.
After clicking on the ad, she reads my blog post or informational page on why this particular foundation for oily skin will last all day.
This is the solution she has been looking for. She adds it to her cart and orders without hesitation because she is happy to have found the answer she was looking for.
The keys are being able to identify her pain point and provide an effective solution. This is the power of using buyer personas in your marketing.
Do you see the need for this in your business, but don’t have the time, knowledge, or desire to implement buyer personas as part of your marketing efforts? Let NTEK Creative come in and help you create buyer personas that will draw in leads and generate sales.