How to Read Minds: A Guide to Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are a semi-fictional, generalized representation of your business’ ideal target customers, the customers that are genuinely interested in investing in your goods and services. Personas are vital to relating to your target customers as real people with real wants and needs. They are also useful when your business wants to build value or solve a problem. By gathering information on your audience and constructing a deeper understanding of who they are, you are able to create a more effective marketing strategies and campaigns built around acquisition and retention.
Buyer personas, like mind reading, are a way of gathering information and creating a generalized idea of the person you’re trying to reach. It’s a type of “marketing caricature” that describes a typical customer or client. Knowing the different types of customers who regularly use your business can help you market to them specifically and better meet their needs. A typical business will often need multiple buyer personas that work together in order to accurately pinpoint the various types of people that their marketing efforts should cater to.
Crafting the Perfect Persona
The best part about creating buyer personas is that they’re not hard to make. The key to the perfect persona is making sure you take the time to ask the right people the right questions. You then take the information you gather and present it in a way that your business will be able to use effectively.
It’s vital to collect accurate information about your target audience. This information can be collected from a variety of places including: website analytics, social media platforms, in-person interactions with customers, surveys, and more.
Social Media
Social media pages offer a great source of information on the types of people interested in your goods and services. You’re able to collect information about your customers based on their interactions with your pages and their ability to speak freely to your business. Feel free to ask your customers questions and listen to their feedback to better understand who they are, their priorities, and reasoning for interacting with your business.
In-Person Interactions
One-on-one communication is a great way to get to know your customers and gather the valuable information needed to build successful buyer personas. Gathering in-person interactions can be as easy as hosting an event at your business, setting up a booth at a trade show, interacting with customers during their visit, or even offsite at a public place such as a coffee shop.
Surveys
Surveys will tell you a lot about who your customers are and what their preferences and desires are. People enjoy describing themselves through brief surveys that offer big rewards. Utilizing email marketing to convince your customers to complete a survey is a great way to gather the vital information needed to focus on buyer personas
Building Your Buyer Personas
When you begin building your company’s buyer personas, start with the most general information first. Fill in the client’s name, age, location and occupation. After that you can start filling in more detailed information. Much of this will come down to educated guesses and what you can gather from researching your client or customer base. Be sure to avoid stereotyping, and focus on thinking outside of the box.
Use the information you’ve gathered to fill in more specific information such as name and type of employment or business, their job titles and other information. After careful analysis and critical thinking, your marketing team will be able to construct accurate buyer personas.
Working With a Marketing Team
Working with our professional marketing team is the best way to build a comprehensive and well-rounded set of buyer personas that will help develop your overall marketing strategy. Buyer personas can take a lot of time. As a successful business owner, we know it can be difficult to put the proper amount of time and effort into gathering the necessary information to build a successful marketing strategy.
We know the best practices to construct the best buyer personas for your business, so contact Splash Omnimedia today! We may not be able to read minds, but we can develop a targeted strategy that will drive your message to the right audience.
