Trying to Make it Easy: Building an Audience Persona
In an era where possibly every media source is propagating some advertisement, where every influencer is promoting a product, you need to ensure that your ad relates to your audience. But, how do you ensure that your advertisement addresses each individual differently and appeals to them in the same way you intended it?
Well, that’s where Buyer Persona comes in! A buyer persona is a fictional character representing your target audience’s core values and personality. It is something that represents your target audience.
You’ll give this buyer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. You’ll understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. I have even seen some marketers go above and beyond to sketch their buyer personas along with the type of attire they might expect those personas to wear.
You want to perceive your buyer persona as a real person. This will allow you to craft marketing messages targeted specifically to them.
Note: Buyer personas are also called audience personas and market personas.
Why Use a Buyer Persona?
Imagine you are devising a campaign for your business/ client’s products or services. You need to know who you are making the ad for because the most successful ad campaigns historically have been where the entire campaign aligned with the buyer persona. Once you define your buyer personas, you can create organic posts and social ads that speak directly to the target customers you have specified. Social media Advertising is particularly vital for defining buyer persona since, with advanced targeting tools, you can exactly reach your buyer.
How to Create a Buyer Persona: Step by Step
Now that we know what a buyer persona is and what it is for, you need to start creating one. Remember that you have to approach this logically and with a data-centric mindset to ensure that your buyer persona aligns with your goals.
Step-1: Audience Research
Time to find out who our existing customers and competitors are targeting. Multiple articles give an in-depth overview of these topics, but I found this Hootsuite blog most useful.
To know your customers/ prospects better, you need to find information regarding the following:
- Age
- Location
- Language
- Spending power and patterns
- Interests
- Challenges
- Stage of life
- For B2B: The size of businesses and who makes purchasing decisions
While some of these data may seem difficult to approximate, you can use a few tools to make your life easier: (a) Use your existing customer database, (b) Have a newsletter? Find out info about the people who receive it © Facebook and Instagram Analytics (d) Have a website? Google Analytics is there to help you out. If you are entirely new to it, don’t worry. Look into your competitors and profile people who interact with your competitors the most.
Sites such as Socialbakers (Now Emplify) can also help you do this research. Make sure this step is as thorough as it gets.
Step-2: Identify Customer Pain Points:
78% of ads that appeal to customers’ pain points are engaged with (Source: Facebook, 2019); knowing your customers’ pain points and goals are critical to hook them with your ads. Find out problems you can help your audience and make your ads based on that.
On the other side of the coin, try to find out your audience’s aspirations, goals, wants, and needs. Find out whether your TG wants to lose weight, have a good time, party, study, travel, or all at once!
Analysis tools such as Facebook Analytics, your sales team, your website, the customer support department, etc., can be a great way to find this data. You can also dive deeper and use social listening or social media sentiment analysis tools.
Step-3: Strategize to ensure your USPs align with Customer Pain Points & Needs:
Once you get a hold of your customer’s goals, wants, and needs, find out how you or your product can help. Look beyond your product’s features and analyze your product’s or service’s actual benefits.
Anything your product does is a feature; however, benefit happens when your product or service improves the customer’s life.
Draw a consumer buying journey, find out where your consumer is now and how your product/service can take them further into conversion.
Step-4: Create Buyer Personas
So now that you have all the research and insights regarding your target audience, start looking for common characteristics.
You can give your persona a name based on your preferences. Other than that, jot down everything else you know about them.
Examples of Audience Persona
Say you identify a core customer group as 40-year-old, professionally successful city-dwelling women with no kids and a passion for great restaurants. Your buyer persona might be “High-Achiever Haley.”
- She is 41 years old.
- She goes to spin class three times a week.
- She lives in Toronto and is the founder of her PR firm.
- She owns a Tesla.
- She and her partner go on two international vacations yearly and prefer to stay at boutique hotels.
- She’s a member of a wine club.
So you get the gist, this isn’t just a description but a detailed and specific representation of a particular person. It allows you to think about your future buyer humanly, so they are not just a collection of data points. These things may not necessarily be true of every buyer in your audience, but they help represent an archetype tangibly. This will help you make creatives and ads which relate to your audience more and, on the other hand, gives you more return on your ads.
Here are a few more fun examples of Buyer Persona:
A Beauty Conscious, Magazine-Loving Mom Named Karla
Here’s one example from UX designer James Donovan. Meet Karla Kruger, here are details about her job, age, and demographic — and of course, her pain points and goals. She’s 41 years old and pregnant.
What’s interesting about this example is that it also includes her media consumption and her favorite brands. Details are key for bringing any audience persona to life.
Here, we also see where “Karla” falls on various spectrums of brand loyalty, social influence, and price sensitivity. If these sorts of details are important to know about your customer, seek that information out in your research phase and include it in your persona template!
A Brand-Loyal Suburban Home Cook
This example from Survey Monkey of a buyer persona breathes life into a fictional data analyst. We learn about her education and where she lives, but also about her interests and passions — she likes to cook and travel, values her relationships, and is brand-loyal.
If this were your company’s prototypical client, how would that impact your marketing strategy or product offerings? Having a clearly defined buyer persona helps frame every decision you make.
A Dog-Loving Young Professional
For this buyer persona, created by digital marketing agency Single Grain, we learn about Tommy Technology’s income and love life, as well as his career struggles. Including some quotes (either repurposed from real customers or invented) can help give a character like this a voice, too.
This effectively sums up your brief introduction to marketing funnels and how we can effectively acquire customers through them. Hoping to look into how to retain existing customers while talking about the digital customer journey using the marketing funnel in the next post. Till then, have a great time and take it easy!
