If your business is starting digital marketing, you might be making decisions like; who is my ideal audience and how can I target that audience to get the most conversions?
You might say “well, everyone is my ideal customer”. But, this is a huge mistake in digital marketing. You will waste your ad spend, time, and generate a large number of bad leads. Bad leads are never good for any business.
One tool that digital marketers use to combat defining their target audience is called the “buyer persona”. Buyer personas are an integral part of the inbound marketing method.
What are Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictitious account of an ideal customer that will most likely convert to your product or service. (Hubspot)
The buyer persona is developed from data taken from previous marketing efforts and market research. Buyer personas are extremely useful for both B2C and B2B Marketers. It is mainly used to make decisions that will affect the customer journey through the marketing funnel and plays a role in lead generation.
Importance of a buyer persona
It is important to generate a buyer persona for your business. From the start of business creation, there is an ideal person in mind whose problems will be solved by the product or service being offered by this new business. This customer has specific characteristics that you have to identify and use to find more similar customers in order for your business to survive.
Buyer Persona can help segment and fine-tune your audience
The internet is massive. Millions of people around the world have access to the internet. It doesn’t make sense for you to have a target audience of every internet user in digital marketing. It is way too broad of an audience to consider everyone as an ideal customer.
Unless you are a large corporation, you most likely do not have the marketing budget to target every single person in the world either. It is impossible.
If you fine-tune your audience, you can focus on the areas that your customer goes to. It might be social media, blogs, etc. This increases the chances of conversion and minimizes your workload as you won’t have to focus on trying to appeal to a large audience.
Buyer Personas Are Integral for Paid Media Campaigns
The days of organic reach in digital marketing are past us. Unless your website is optimized for search engine traffic, you can’t expect to receive large amounts of traffic without using some form of paid media. Whether it’s Facebook or Google Ads – you need to target your campaigns to reach people that fit the characteristics of your ideal customer.
If you neglect to target your audience, you will run through your ad spend without getting any results. You need to apply the information generated through your buyer persona to the advertising platform’s targeting options to get the best results for your buck.
Buyer Personas Play a Role in Content Creation Too
Buyer personas are also important for content creation. Based on your buyer persona, you can develop a content marketing strategy that’ll appeal to your customer. Through research, you can identify what type of content appeals to your audience.
Some people prefer to consume content through blogs, others prefer video. You need to leverage the ideal content type and focus your efforts on that medium. A good content strategy driven by a buyer persona can have a huge return on investment for your business.
What are the Components of Buyer Personas?
Demographics
Demographics are the identifiable statistical data associated with your audience. This is where you determine the ideal age range, gender, location, race of your customer.
Demographics are important especially with ad campaigns because it’s your most reliable audience identifier, especially for Facebook Ads. Facebook doesn’t like to collect hard personal information that will be useful for targeting. For ad campaigns (unless you’re using a lookalike audience) Facebook will show your ad to a user that may interact based on their Facebook activity.
Media platforms are keeping users’ data privacy in mind which will make targeting much more difficult. Having a basic understanding of the demographics of a customer that will convert will be very helpful in the long run because we know those minimal targeting options won’t go away.
Background (Psychographics)
The background component of the buyer persona is where you assess a person’s lifestyle also known as identifying psychographics. In this section, you will consider things like what job does your individual has, how many kids, how do they get to work every day, etc.
The more granular you can get the better. This is important when it comes to deciding when and where to target your audience.
For example, a financial analyst on Wall Street has a completely different lifestyle from that of a shop owner. The financial analyst most likely won’t have the time to check social media or emails, so it might be more appropriate to do a retargeting campaign for them. A shop owner might finish up work at 5 pm, go pick up the kids, & cook dinner. The best way to target them is through podcasts or social media ads they view or listen to while cooking or unwinding.
Identifiers
Aided by the information you input in the background section, the identifier section is where you can make those decisions on how best to reach your ideal target audience.
A good tip for thinking about the identifiers is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. You can even think about your own life and how you decided on the reasons you do certain things. You can also ask friends or relatives that might fit the mold of being an ideal customer as well.
NOTE – Remember don’t get too caught up thinking about on particular segment of your ideal audience. Sometimes, you have many personalities your product or service would be great for. You can make many buyer personas.
Challenges
The challenges section identifies the problem your ideal customer is facing. This section is great because you can customize your product or even your marketing flow or funnel to better suit the person’s experience.
What problems does your customer need solving? What is causing them to have these problems? These are all things you need to think of when generating the challenges for your buyer persona.
Goals
The final thing you need to think about for the buyer persona is what goals your ideal customer has. It can be assumed that one of their goals is to have their problem solved. But you need to think deeper than that. What happens after you solve their problem?
This comes into play when expanding or improving your product offering. It’s better to have these things in mind so you can keep these customers for life. The end goal for your business is to gain new customers and keep the old ones. This is a great way to start thinking about retaining customers.
How to Create Buyer Personas?
Where to get this data or ideas from?
Internal Market Research
Step one in starting your buyer persona process is to use the information at your disposal. You can look at your marketing data found in your CRM (conversions, customer behavior). Another great source is your sales team.
Your sales team is on the front lines with the customer. They interact with customers daily and have the most knowledge of what the pain points are and also know the ideal characteristics of a customer that will convert. It may be worth your time to get a few meetings with the sales team and have them active in the creation process.
External Market Research
You can get information about demographics from a quick Google search. Two great sources are the bureau of labor services and the census websites.
Bureau of Labor Services – https://www.bls.gov/bls/demographics.htm
Census – https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ces/data/restricted-use-data/demographic-data.html
There are plenty of other sources to get information on the internet, use the search engines to find the information you need. You can also take a look at the competition and see what they are doing and to whom they may be marketing to.
Getting Started
There are templates you can find online to start creating your buyer persona. Websites like Hubspot and Semrush have interactive portals dedicated to building buyer personas and make the process very easy.
All you need to get started is a word document. Create the following categories (demographics, background, identifiers, challenges, and goals) and leave space so you can enter information. In each section instead of copying and pasting the information, you found through your research, write a quick 3 – 5 sentence paragraph about what you found out and describe your ideal customer.
Once you add all the information about your ideal customer in each respective paragraph, give your buyer persona a fictional name. This helps your buyer persona come to life and it’s a bit easier to remember and refer to during marketing meetings.
Example of a buyer persona
Below is an example of a buyer persona profile I created. For this scenario, I am dealing with a client that sells pre-college prep courses for students trying to get into the best finance university in the United States.
Wall Street Frank
Demographics
Frank is a 50-year-old male living in Jersey City, New York. He is married and has two children, one approaching college age. He makes a hefty salary of $150,000 and is the head of the household.
Background
Frank attended the University of Pennsylvania at the prestigious Wharton School of Business. He understands the value of education networking and wants the best for his children. He works on Wall Street as an investment banker at JP Morgan and commutes to the city using New Jersey Transit.
As lucrative as his career is, it does take a toll on his life. He doesn’t have much time for family as he is traveling out of state for meetings and working late hours.
Identifiers
Since Frank is traveling and working late, he catches up on world events through podcasts. He is very rarely on social media because his company monitors his internet usage but he does have an active Facebook account to check in with family members.
Challenges
Frank is struggling to find time to get his daughter prepared for college. He also knows that schooling is very expensive and wants his daughter to get the best value for her buck.
Goals
He wants his daughter to be in the most optimal position for success in college and the start of her career.
How to Use The Buyer Persona?
After you complete your buyer persona, you can now apply it to your marketing decisions. Two applications for your buyer persona can be your marketing plan or your campaign strategy let’s examine using the Wall Street Frank persona in the previous section and how I can use it to market financial education courses.
For this example, since Frank is struggling to find time due to his work, I need to figure out a medium that is quick and can leave a long-lasting impression on Frank. Also, since financial education courses are a huge investment, I’ll expect Frank to do some research to learn more about the course offerings for his daughter. The price point for the classes might be a bit higher as well, so there will be less likely of an impulse buy which is great for paid media campaigns because your return on ad spend will be very favorable.
For lead generation, I might look to create a landing page with a free brochure download that talks about the course. It’ll serve as the incentive for Frank to give us his information. In return, Frank will have a brochure he can peruse at any time at his leisure.
I would run a google ads campaign targeting keywords surrounding searches about financial education courses for pre-college students. One campaign will send traffic to a landing page that contains all the information about the course being offered. I’ll also set up a retargeting campaign so once a user clicks to the landing page, they will get later exposure to ads promoting the course on various websites that support Google Ads.
Since I’m targeting parents like Wall Street Frank, I’ll set the age to 40+, country targeting to New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and occupation to financial services.
The goal of the campaign will be to get Wall Street Frank in the marketing funnel. Since it’s not a quick process to buy, Frank will need to be nurtured to become a marketing qualified lead to be passed to the sales team.
Once he completes a lead form for more information, I’d send a series of emails talking about the benefits of the courses for his child kindly nudging him to consider making a purchase. The email flow should take about a month.
If Frank makes it through the flow without converting, I’d consider Frank to be a marketing qualified lead and pass his information over to the sales team. The sales team will then get on the phone or email him to see if they can answer any questions or concerns about purchasing a course for his daughter.
Conclusion
A buyer persona is an important tool for you to supercharge your digital marketing. It is very simple to set up and you can even follow templates online to guide you through the process. You can apply the buyer persona to your marketing plan or campaign strategies.
