Know your customer - creating a marketing persona

Did you know that 56% of consumers believe businesses need to have a deeper understanding of their needs, with 51% believing that businesses send out too much irrelevant content? Drawing on actual data about your existing customers is a cornerstone to growing your business. If you truly understand who your business is targeting to become customers, marketing communications can be better designed to attract them. It may well also influence the way you operate as a business to best serve their needs and, frankly, your investment in marketing will be more effective.

Buyer (or marketing) personas are fundamental to developing a better understanding of your existing and prospective customers and incredibly useful in helping you ‘walk a mile in their shoes’. This is of huge benefit when it comes to your marketing efforts as being armed with this knowledge makes it easier to tailor your content and messaging according to the specific needs and behaviours of your audience. 

We have created this how-to-guide for understanding buyer personas, how they can help you better understand the wants, needs and pain points of your audience, and, in turn, better position your market offering to them, and the problems your product or service solves for them - in other words, your value proposition. 

What is a Buyer Persona and why are they important?

A buyer persona is a fictional, generalised visualisation of the exact person or customer segment you want to sell to. Taking a definition from Ardath Albee, a buyer persona is “a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience.”

By gaining insight into what your ideal customer needs and what motivates their buying decisions, you will be able to build awareness and create an effective business and marketing strategy to better reach your target market. As we said in our earlier article, without a clear understanding of who your customers are, and the audience your business is trying to reach, any marketing investment on finding and keeping customers will likely not work as hard for you as it could. 

Personas are developed through a process of robust market research from the initial data discovery, cleaning and analysis to the final visualisation. Most businesses draw on their existing customer data to glean a deeper understanding of the categories they fall into and the particular behaviours they display. 

According to Sam Campbell who runs digital marketing blog Reddiquette, there are three primary types of buyer personas: 

• The information seeker: Gathers information to help them reach a decision and may research several different options before buying to ensure they are making an informed purchasing choice. 
• The decision-maker: Personas falling into this type of category make the final decision about whether to buy a product or service. They may look to others for advice but they have the driver’s seat when it comes to making a purchase. 
• The influencer: Influencers are people who, whilst they may not directly make a purchase, are able to significantly influence the decision maker that their opinion is worth considering in the purchase journey. A good example of an influencer would be an accountant who tells small business owners which accounting software to purchase. 

What Does it Look Like 

Buyer personas will look different depending on your business. We have included a simple example to illustrate what a given buyer persona template looks like: Product Designer David Miller. 

Source: Inside Design

But....don't get lost in the format. Keep it simple. Sketch out your persona in a way that will be useful to you and will help you more deeply understand your customer.

How Do You Create a Buyer Persona 

Although semi-hypothetical profiles, a buyer persona needs to be an accurate representation of your best customers. Therefore, it is essential to have relevant sources and data to gather insights about them. 

It is crucial, however, that, when creating buyer personas, your insights are based on market research and solid data about your existing customers rather than subjective assumptions. Huble advise being methodical in your approach and asking yourself who would be interested in your what your business offers.

Huble suggests beginning by asking yourself questions that will help you set up a framework of who your ideal target market is. Whether you are selling to businesses or consumers, questions such as: 

• B2C: how old are they? What is their gender? What are their spending habits? What behaviours do they exhibit? What other relevant personal characteristics do they have?
• B2B: What do they do? What industry are they in and how long have they been in that industry? Their job title? Their highest education level/qualifications?
• Where do they live 
• What does a typical day look like for them?
• Their preferred content format (blog posts, videos, social media posts)
• Their role in making a purchase - are they an influencer, an information seeker, or a final decision maker?
• What social media platforms do they use? Where do they look for information?
• The challenges they face to a day-to-day basis (their pains) and what makes them look for a solution (their gains)
• What are their internal and external fears?
• Are they an impulse buyer, or do they carefully weigh up each purchase decision? 
• The questions they ask your sales people during the sales process 
• What benefit does your product/service offer them, or do you need to convince them of the value it would bring? 

Once you have collected robust data about your target market, the next step in this process is to categorise your personas into groups. This allows you to create distinct groups for each buyer persona you market to. 

Where to Gather Buyer Persona Data

According to SparkPPC, you can collect information on the demographics and interests of your customers by: 

• Surveying your existing customers
• Surveying your competitors’ customers 
• Searching through online resources such as Quora or Reddit 
• Look at your Google Analytics, Facebook Audience insights, and the built-in analytics tools of any other platform used by your business 
• Using your best judgement based on your experiences

In Summary 

Buyer personas are a crucial part of any inbound marketing campaign and provide a springboard on which you can build your marketing strategy, and are vital for ensuring you are targeting your efforts at the right customer. Being armed with your buyer persona insights will help you better communicate your value proposition to your target market, and position your marketing much more effectively.

The GrowthBox view?

This is a really useful and important area and is one of those things that will most likely present an 'a-ha' moment as it is developed. Aligning your sales and marketing with what you learn about customers will really help your marketing investment be more effective. Planning is vital to marketing success, being in the shoes of your target audience is an important part of that. Know your customer!

For more advice and a free and immediate marketing health check, head to www.growthbox.co.uk.

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