Buyer Personas...What?
You might be asking: Why do I need a buyer persona? Why not just try to sell my product or service to everyone?
There are several reasons, the most important being that you don't have the resources to sell your product or service to everyone. You'll quickly go bankrupt if you try selling your product everywhere without identifying who needs it most.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a description of a potential customer based on real customer data and some informed speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.
Companies use buyer personas to help them design marketing strategies and campaigns that are more likely to resonate with the people they want to attract.
A buyer persona is made up of:
Demographics: Basic information such as age, occupation, and location.
Background: Details that help you understand who this person is as an individual, what their challenges are, and what motivates them to act.
Goals: The things this buyer persona wants to achieve in life or at work. This can include both short-term goals (ex: "I need to increase my salary by 10% so I can pay for my son's trade school") and long-term goals (ex: "I want to own a bunker someday.").
Don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds. Keep reading to learn more.
Get a basic understanding of your online shoppers and their behavior
In the digital era, shopping online is the new normal. It doesn't matter whether you're looking for a sweater or a used car—if you can buy it on the Internet, you can find it without ever leaving home.
In addition, marketers have been watching consumer behavior as people shop online, and they've found that there are three main factors that influence every purchase decision:
What's convenient to buy
How much it costs
Why do they shop with your competitors?
Marketers call these factors "the 3Cs."
Fortunately, you can use tools to help you out. Remember to look for the following features:
Data visualization: So you can see exactly how people behave on your website, and how you can change it to better suit their needs.
Heat maps: Find out what parts of your site are most visited and where people leave, so you can optimize.
Scroll maps: See how far down the page people scroll, so you can make sure they're reading everything they should be.
Customer analytics: Get a picture of what devices and browsers customers use to visit your site, so you can optimize.
Determine your target consumer
You understand the value of knowing your audience.
It’s also crucial for you to have a thorough understanding of who your customers are and what problems they're facing.
If you don't, you could be missing out on precious time and resources.
Don't let your brand get lost in a sea of sameness.
Create a buyer persona–a fictional person who closely resembles your target consumer
The first step in creating your first buyer persona is to fully understand who your buyers are.
Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, allowing you to tailor content that will be relevant and meaningful to them. This process can also help you uncover any gaps in your buyer journey—content wise or otherwise—and work to fill them in with targeted information that meets your customers' needs at each stage of the research process.
After all, your product or service is only as good as it is for your target customer. If you don't know who that is, you're going to have a hard time selling it—and a hard time getting them to come back for more.
You can build individual buyer personas for various customers, or for each primary audience segment you have identified as part of your digital marketing strategy. You can do this from scratch by creating composite sketches.
However, it's not enough to just say "young people" or "adults over 50." You need to get into specifics and really dig into who your customers are:
What inspires them?
What drives them?
What do they want out of life?
How do they see themselves?
The more specific you get about these questions, the clearer your idea of your customer will be. That's why I've put together this list of questions that can help you build out a buyer persona and identify exactly who you're selling to:
Start with what you know. If you already have an idea of who your target audience is, start there. Use the information you have to create a basic persona template, including categories like demographics and job title. This is a good starting point because it allows you to expand upon pre-existing assumptions with additional research without having to start from scratch.
What are your prospects' demographic characteristics? Age, gender, marital status, education level, income level, and geographic location are all important factors in understanding potential customers.
What does a typical day in the life of your customer look like? Knowing what kind of daily routine your customers have will help you understand how your product or service benefits them.
Find common characteristics among your buyers
The most successful brands are those that have a very clear vision of what they're doing and who they're targeting—and then building their products and campaigns around that vision.
Further, strategic branding is most effective when it's narrowed down to one specific group of people—one that is made up of individuals who all have similar interests, lifestyles, habits, and needs. This is why it's so crucial to document common characteristics among your target audience.
Think about who should buy this item and what they need to do to purchase it
Did you know that one in three consumers purchases products online? That's a huge number, and it means that if you're not selling online, you're potentially missing out on a lot of customers.
From there, figure out how these people like to shop: Do they buy their groceries in bulk or only when they need something specific? How do they like to pay for things—what forms of payment do they use most often? Once you've got this information about your current and potential customers, then you can brainstorm ways to get more people like them interested in what you sell.
To summarize
Almost every aspect of the buyer persona is beneficial to running a successful e-commerce site. With this in mind, it's not hard to see why online retailers are starting to rely on unique buyer personas more and more. By focusing on the individual traits that your customers possess, you can start creating better content, selling products more effectively, and even targeting your marketing campaigns much more precisely.