It is one of the key points in an Inbound Marketing strategy and a great tool to make your investment in advertising pay more. In this post we will tell you everything about how to create a Buyer Persona.
You can spend thousands of dollars on advertising, but if you don't have a solid marketing strategy and an accurate idea of who your real customer is, you will probably get poor results. At present, it is not enough to have a good product, a great service or a solid business. It is also not enough to have a vague idea of who our target audience is. Not at all! Today it is essential to know, outline, understand and get along with our ideal clients: understand what they want, what they do, what they are like, what they feel identified with and what they want to avoid. All this not only to optimize the quality of our products and services, but also to improve the communication of our company and retain our audience. Therefore, from Teipe Digital we share a 5-step guide to create a Buyer Persona that will be very useful for your business.
What is the Buyer Persona?
Hubspot, one of the most important Inbound Marketing platforms in the world and Teipe Digital Partners, defines it as “a semi-fictitious representation of your ideal clients”. In other words, it is not about flesh and blood people, but about a model created from the information that companies have about their real users and their experience with their products and their brands.
The data and information you have about your real and potential clients are the key to creating a solid Buyer Persona. There you must work with objective and subjective data and try to fully understand the profile of your client. Your geographical location, your purchasing power, what you work on, what your cultural consumption is, what are your personal aspirations, what you do in your free time, with whom you identify, who you admire, what are your fears, what do you want to avoid with your product or your service, etc.
The more you know about your Buyer Persona, the better you can foresee his reactions and you can communicate better with him, make him feel understood and you can convince him that your brand is what he needs for his life.
What is the Buyer Persona for?
As we mentioned before, the Buyer Persona will help you create better content for your brand. But it will also help you with the general branding of your business: to build actions, symbols and values that will make your client identify with you.
And although this may seem abstract, remember that brand building and efficient communication actions translate into cost reduction. The more effective your campaigns are, the better you understand your customers and the more people you can build loyalty, the more profitable your business will be.
Guide: Create your Buyer Persona in Five Steps
So… Once we understand what it is and what it is for to define our Buyer Persona, the moment of truth arrives. Below we share a step by step that can serve as a guide to create profiles for your business. Remember that they are not static formulas, rather they are ideas that you will have to work on for several hours and reformulate over time.
Stage 1: Establish your needs
The first thing is to define an action plan: what data are we going to look for to create a good Buyer Persona? At this stage we are going to define which questions and data are relevant to our business and which are not. For example, what do you do in your free time? Do you prefer to buy from your mobile or computer? What are your concerns? What are your goals? While we need to have general data, such as where they live, how old they are, or if they are mostly male or female, it is also necessary to address personal and psychological issues.
Stage 2: Sort customer information
Once you have closed the questions and data that you want to search for, it is time to go to your sources to find answers. This is a good time to get creative and look a little further.
At this point you can take advantage of all the resources you have at your disposal. Do you have statistics on your buyers? Can you interview them? What can you say about them? It can also be very helpful to work with your business sales team and ask them what they can say about their experience with customers. They are in constant contact with them, so you will surely be surprised to hear their responses.
But also, if you are starting from scratch or want to go a little beyond your own experience, we suggest you analyze the content and networks of your competition. There you will be able to contrast what they are doing, how they are communicating with their audience, who they are talking to and see what content and channels work best for them and which ones are better to avoid.
In this exercise you will find opportunities to exploit that your competition is not using or a true source of inspiration to create high quality content. There are no limits! Explore your digital ecosystem; social networks, websites, blogs, Linkedin groups, etc ...
Stage 3: Answer your questions
Once you have collected all the information, it is time to profile your Buyer Persona. Although all the data seems relevant, try to sort it by answering the questions you asked yourself in step 1.
When you have answered all the questions, try to see how your products or services respond to the needs that arise from said questionnaire. Find the opportunities that can lead you to solve their needs and also think about how to overcome the resistance.
At this point it is vital that you know the strengths and weaknesses of your business and that you be as honest as possible about them. In this way, the strategies you develop will be more powerful and will respond better to the reality of your brand.
Stage 4: Outline your Buyer Persona
Now, let's get to work! Take a pencil and paper and start outlining your ideal client in as much detail as possible, with a clear and practical format, understandable to your entire work team.
Give it a first and last name, face, body. As if he were a character in a novel, he writes what he does, what his story is, what he hopes for the future, what he fears, what he wants and what his daily life is like.
Stage 5: Share and keep improving
Once you have finished your or your Buyer Persona, share them with the rest of your company. You will see that it will be very helpful to all sectors beyond marketing to better understand what the customer's needs are and how to address them.
Of course: always keep in mind that the Buyer Persona is not something definitive, but like humans and social situations, it is constantly changing. For this reason, we suggest that you be open to listening to suggestions, criticisms and new ideas. They can periodically schedule meetings to see how the different Buyer Personas they have outlined are mutating and define new strategies to communicate with them.
How many Buyer Persona should you create for your strategy?
An excellent question with a difficult answer! It will depend a lot on your business model and the variety of your products or services.
You have to find the right number so that the amount of Buyer Personas is not limiting or that it is about creating for the sake of creating. It is good to think about the different product lines that your company has and define from there what profile goes for each product.
Have you already created your Buyer Persona? Did you try to do it but you have doubts? At Teipe Digital our team of Inbound Marketing experts will help you create a complete and effective strategy to help you obtain the best results.
Contact us now for more information!