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If you know the exact solutions your customers want to get from your product and how they want to be served, how great would marketing your product be?

It would be bliss.

You’d sell so much you’d get tired thinking about how to spend your profits.

But this is far from reality. Because you don’t know exactly what your customers want.

However, you can take the next best step to attract the right customers for your business.

You can create an effective buyer persona.

When you create a buyer persona, it becomes easier to turn your website visitors into customers.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional document that provides the details of what your ideal customer for a product or service looks like.

It explains important details like their position in their company, their general interests, major challenges they expect your product to meet, and other important details you need.

A buyer persona should be as detailed as possible. The number of details you have in your buyer persona will depend on how creative you are with the questions you need to answer about your customers to give them the best service possible.

It is, however, important to note that having a buyer persona is important to how you run your business.

A buyer persona guides you to put out the right content that is more likely to attract your customers to buy your products.

However, when it comes to the issue of using personas, only 15% of marketers believe they’re very effective at using it according to an ITSMA survey.

How buyer persona makes your content effective

Whether you want to write a post on your website or newsletter to your email subscribers, having a detailed buyer persona helps you to create a personalized message to your audience.

Statistics displayed in an infographic by Single Grain shows that using buyer persona can make your website 2 to 5 times more effective by targeting users.

Likewise, using buyer personas in your emails increase your click-through rates by 14% and conversion rate by 10%. This helps to drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.

When you’re about to draft a content strategy for your business, it’s a big step that could make or mar your business.

Having a content strategy that fails to appeal to your potential customers is a waste of your time and your visitor’s.

A buyer persona helps you to know the topics to write about and the benefits to emphasize to attract your visitors.

With this strategy, you’re also able to get more organic traffic to your website as you end up using the vocabulary that your prospects use to search for your products.

By creating buyer personas and writing content that appeals to them, Skytap, a self-service provider of cloud automation solutions, got a 55% increase in its organic search traffic, 97% increase in leads from online marketing, and 124% increase in leads from all channels.

Important information to have on your buyer persona

The rule of thumb is that your buyer persona should be as detailed as possible to capture all the important information about your prospects.

However, no matter how short on details you want your personas to be, there are vital pieces of information that should be present.

Some of them are:

Name 

Even though this is a fictional depiction of your customers, it is important that you give it a name. This helps you to treat your buyer persona as a real person and play to their emotions.

The fact remains that you’re using your buyer persona to represent a human being somewhere. For any human being, the most important piece of information is their name because that’s one of their basic forms of identification.

Below is an example of a buyer persona by HubSpot showing the name and other details.

Age group

Different age groups have different needs. And even when they have the same needs, they go about meeting those needs differently.

For instance, the way millennials use technology to solve their problems is different from how baby boomers do. If you’re selling a hoverboard, do you target people who are over 50?

Most people who use this device are below that age range.

However, if you’re selling a CRM software which is ideal for a big company with hundreds of staff members, it is better to target people who are in their forties as they’re more likely to be the marketing heads of these companies.

Specifying the age group of your buyer persona helps you to get other pieces of information that are relevant to that age group. You can look at other behaviors that they likely engage in.

Location

Where do your ideal customers live? Your location can be a large area or small according to your needs.

It could be a whole nation or a state or even a single city. For instance, if your aim is to serve silicon valley companies, then your location will likely be restricted to California.

Specifying the location of an area helps you to identify their culture and the unique struggles they face that is absent in other places. For example, one of the big issues in silicon valley is the cost of living.

If you mention details that your prospects understand, then they can identify with you and trust you more.

Family status

The way you approach a customer who has a family is different from how you approach one that is single. It is no surprise that people consider their families when making their career choices and when choosing tools for their jobs.

Somebody who is single probably won’t care so much about sleeping over at their workplace if they have to meet a deadline. However, a man or woman who has a family will likely not do so.

Someone who has a family may also have to deal with parenthood which is another job in itself. When you define the family status of your buyer persona, you’re able to identify with their happiness and struggles.

You also know what part of their emotions to appeal to and how to make your products cater to those needs. In most cases, age is usually correlated to family status. But there are usually exceptions and the family status should be specified.

Working Hours

Knowing the time your customers spend at work and home helps to determine the timing of your messages. This is especially applicable if you use customer relationship and email marketing software to reach your customers.

For some products, they are more applicable in homes while others are applicable at work. There are cases where your products are both applicable at work and at home.

If you’re selling a product that is applicable at work, it is better to send your messages at the time when your prospects are at work. This makes it easier for them to take the necessary decisions while at work.

If your product is used at home, then you should send marketing messages when they are at home. They can easily see its application in their homes. Likewise, it’s not a distraction since they’re out of work.

Work Challenges

When people decide to use a product or subscribe to a service, it is usually to solve a problem. Many times, your product could have many benefits.

But what is the most important benefit to your buyer persona? This is linked to their biggest challenges at work.

Are they starved of time? Do they need better collaboration? Do they need a platform for keeping customer information?

When you put yourself in the place of your buyer persona, you’re able to see the challenges they expect your product to meet.

When you market your product to meet these challenges, these prospects are more likely to do business with you. Below is an example of a buyer persona by Buffer that shows challenges and other details.

What are some important steps to take when creating a buyer persona for your business?

Research

A vital part of creating a buyer persona is research. First of all, you need to ask what you know about your customers.

Usually, whatever you know presently is not enough to create a buyer persona. It is important that you engage in more research to get more details about your buyer persona.

If you don’t have enough customers to research, then you can do your research on the common traits of your ideal customers.

For instance, if your product is targeting the marketing head of software companies, you need to find out some traits common to them.

What is their usual education level? What is their average age? What’s their family size? What’s their average income? How many workers do they have reporting to them?

These and more are the details you need to find to build an accurate buyer persona for your product.

Solution oriented

If you’re selling a product or offering a service, your major aim is to solve a problem for your customers.

When you stop solving problems, then customers have no reason for using your product.

If you’re creating a buyer persona, then an important detail that must be present is the problem your ideal customer is trying to solve.

With an accurate identification of your buyer persona, you can create a copy that will convince them of having their problem solved by your product.

Research shows that 48% of buyers are more likely to consider doing business with providers that personalize their marketing to address their specific business issues.

Gather customer data

To build a buyer persona for future sales, you need to gather data around your current customers.

Having as much information as possible about current customers will direct the actions you need to take in the future to bring in more people like your current customers.

There are many ways you can gather customer data. Some of them are:

Surveys

Many times, to know some details about your customers, you need to ask them. Fortunately, most customers will happily tell you.

Because they see it as a gesture that you care about your customers. For surveys of your customers, you should ask questions that only your customers can answer best.

With surveys, the quality of your questions will determine the quality of the answers you get. This helps to give you more insights into the interests and challenges of your customers.

Likewise, your survey should be an opportunity for customers to register their complaints about your products or services.

CRM

A customer relationship management software is important to the running of your business. This is because it helps to track all your interactions with a customer. Furthermore, you can track your customer’s interests, especially if you sell more than a product.

With a CRM software, you can see your interactions of an individual right from being a lead to becoming a customer. Through this, you’ll understand the actions that turn these leads into customers.

You can then repeat these steps for your new leads and refine your buyer personas as you see the results of your tests.

Google Analytics

for every website, Google analytics gives great insights into the demographics of your visitors. You check details like location, source, gender, and other details of your visitors.

This helps you to build an accurate database of information about people who visit your website and are likely to become customers.

Design around your most profitable customers

Often, you’ll find that your buyer persona doesn’t conform with all your buyers. You’ll usually find buyers who are unlike your buyer persona.

But to design your buyer persona, you need to think of your ideal customers. These are the customers that bring the biggest profits to your business.

If there are people you should be tailoring your message to, it should be these people. When you look at Pareto’s 80/20 rule, it also applies to businesses.

Pareto’s rule applied to business would mean that 20% of your customers would bring 80% of the profits.

If you want to build an effective buyer persona, you have to create it around this 20%. Because the more of this type of customers you have, the better it is for your business in terms of revenues and profit.

Identify the best channels to reach customers

One of the considerations in crafting a buyer persona that works is being able to identify the channels to reach your ideal customers.

What are the devices your ideal customers use to communicate? Apart from that, what social media channels do they use mostly?

Of course, this would define where you spread your messages. If your ideal customers are always on Instagram, but you decide to spread your message on LinkedIn, then you’ll only be sinking money.

This is one of the factors you need to consider.

You should have more than a single persona

When it comes to creating buyer personas, you’re not restricted to a single persona. Because your business can have more than one buyer persona.

For instance, if you run an ecommerce store, you’ll need more than a single buyer persona.

First of all, you probably have products for both males and females. Likewise, you could also have customers in different countries.

This would mean that the way you communicate with them would be different.

Rob Petersen, on Mark Schaefer’s blog, estimates that 3 to 4 buyer personas usually account for more than 90% of a company’s sales.

Update buyer personas

Over time, people’s needs change. This may be due to improvement in technology or a societal trend. Keeping your old buyer persona means you’ll be working with outdated information.

To make your buyer persona always relevant, you must update your buyer persona as you notice new trends in your ideal customers’ behavior.

If your ideal customers have a new challenge they need to meet, then updating your buyer persona will help you to incorporate this need into your content.

Likewise, it will help you to update your product to meet this challenge.

Conclusion

Crafting an effective buyer persona is vital to your business as it helps to streamline your communications with prospects and current customers.

When you know your customers, you can write content that attracts their trust. You can write content from a point of understanding.

Apart from this, you’re able to deliver your messages at the right time when your prospects can take the actions you want. If you run a business today and you don’t have defined buyer personas, it’s long overdue.

If you have buyer personas that only possess a few pieces of information, then you need to conduct more research, gather data, and add more details to your buyer persona.

With this, you become your customers’ friend. When you achieve this, you can make more revenues and profits for your business.

Do you have buyer personas for your business? Have you tried creating or updating one? How has it helped your business? What challenges have you faced? See you in the comments!