Mastering Your Target Audience Powerful Steps to Build Effective Buyer Personas

It is clear to marketers that more than data, marketing is needed for their business to get engagement. While demographic survey results are significant, many factors of customer behavior go into creating a well-rounded and detailed buyer persona.

Combining different research methods to create detailed buyer personas is my glowing recommendation, and in this post, I’ll show you a research-driven method for creating buyer personas. Carefully, you will walk away with stories of consumers and their profiles that show the customer base.

Before we dive into creating a buyer persona, let’s pause to understand the impact of well-developed buyer personas on your business (specifically, your marketing efforts).

What is the Buyer Persona?

The buyer persona will give you a detailed description of the data representing your target audience. This persona is fictional but based on deep research into your existing or desired audience.

You may also hear it called a customer, audience, or marketing persona.

You cannot get to know each customer or prospect individually. However, you can create a customer persona to represent your customer base.

You give this buyer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. You will understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. If you want, you can even put a face to them with a photo or illustration – because maybe it’s important to put a face to a name for your team.

Keeping your buyer persona (or persona) in mind will keep the voice and direction of everything consistent, from product development to your brand voice to the social channels you use.

Why Use Customer Persona in Your Marketing Strategy?

You give this buyer persona a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits. You will understand their goals, pain points, and buying patterns. You can even put a face to them with a photo or an illustration – because it’s important for your team to put a face to the name.

1. Buyer personas help you personalize your marketing.

Personalization is the main reason buyer personas are necessary, and it’s only possible when you truly understand your audience. Customers value personalization, as 96% of marketers say it makes buyers more likely to become repeat customers, and 94% say it increases sales.

2. The buyer’s persons informed about the product’s development.

Extensive research into your target customer doesn’t just help your marketing functions – these insights are in your product development process’s research and development phase.

Understanding your ideal customer experience daily can inspire innovative improvements to your product.

3. Buyer personas enable optimization of demand generation, lead generation, and lead generation content.

Do you know your buyer wants to hear from you? Through buyer persona research, you can find out. Understanding your ideal customer’s communication preferences can inform your demand-generation strategies.

4. Buyer personas help tailor your product message to your target audience.

Buyer personas help you better understand your customers (and prospects), making it easier to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet your target audience’s needs, behaviors, and concerns.

Types of Buyer Persona

Gen Z

Here are some points about Gen Z type of buyers:

• 64% of Generation Z discovered a product on social media in the last three months.
• Recommendations from influencers have a stronger impact than recommendations from friends and family.
• Generation Z cares more than any other generation about brands taking a stand on social issues, especially racial justice (47%), LGBTQ+ rights (46%), and climate change (41%).
• 64% of Generation Z likes to gather information themselves when researching a product or service.
• 61% of Gen Z’s favorite form of content is short videos.

Gen X

Here are some key statistics about Gen X.

• Gen X prefers to discover new products on social networks and surf the Internet.
• Moreover, they enjoy images/photos/infographics the most.
• Gen X generation likes to buy products from online retailers that sell a variety of brands.
• Product quality has the highest influence on Gen X’s purchasing decisions.
• Gen X doesn’t think companies should take a stand on social issues.

How to Create a Buyer Persona Easily?

Let’s look at the steps involved in creating a buyer persona.

1. Fill in basic demographic information about yourself.

Ask demographic questions over the phone, in person, or through online surveys. Remember that some people are comfortable sharing personal information in private, or some may not want it at all, so it’s best practice to make this optional unless it’s a core part of your buyer persona.

2. Share what you’ve learned about your personality’s motivations.

This is where you distill the information you learned from asking “why” during these conversations. What keeps your personality up at night? Who do they want to be? And most importantly, tie it all together by telling people how your company can help them.

3. Help your sales team prepare for interviews with your person.

The personas I create are more valuable and compelling when I include real quotes from interviews that illustrate what my audience cares about, who they are, and what they want.

You can also create a list of objections they may raise so your sales team can prepare to address them during conversations with prospects.

4. Create messaging for your persona.

You can tell people how to talk about your products/services with your person. This includes the hard-nosed vocabulary you should use and the more general elevator pitch that positions your solution in a way that resonates with your personality.

This will help ensure that everyone in your company speaks the same language when conversing with prospects and customers.

Don’t forget to give a name to your persona (e.g., Finance Manager Margie, IT Ian, or Landscaper Larry). Hence, everyone internally refers to each person similarly, allowing team consistency.

Case Study

One of our client’s companies is operating in the cloud computing sector. Their main problem was to understand their audience entirely.

SeoInventiv helped them recognize the need for “great content” in content marketing but also realized that understanding what “great” meant to their audience was critical.

The company initially identified its audience, but more was needed. They embarked on more profound research to hone in on their customers and identify critical product decision-makers.

Data collection was extensive and included:

• CRM and lead tracking data
• Search and other behavioral data
• Input from sales representatives
• Dialogues with existing customers

The effectiveness of customer engagement and asking targeted questions to improve buyer personas has been reaffirmed. With a clear understanding of their target audience, the client began building detailed buyer personas. Instead, they focus on methodically targeting people they frequently encounter in business dealings.

This approach gave them a “90-95%” success rate. Such is the impact of creating accurate and helpful buyer personas that genuinely reflect the ideal customer with the help of SEO inventiveness.

Key things

• Instead of relying on the vague term “great content,” the company studied its audience and customers to understand what great content means to them.
• Creating and refining buyer personas is a necessary and ongoing process for a company.
• Understanding who the decision makers are dramatically increases success.

Conclusion

Seo Inventiv helps you create buyer personas that help you understand your target audience deeper and ensure that everyone on your team knows how to target best, support, and engage with your customers. When you use your personas to guide your decisions, you’ll see your reach improve, your conversions increase, and your customer loyalty increase. 

Partner with SEO Inventiv to create meticulously crafted buyer personas that resonate with your audience. Contact SEO Invetiv today for a free consultation.