When selling a product, whether it be a juice box or a sports car, one of the number one things to focus on is the buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on research and data about your current and potential customers. Buyer personas show a marketer an ideal target audience, who are most likely to make purchases after being marketed to.
That being said, a buyer persona is not always accurate, and when you market a product to the wrong audience, your sales will likely suffer. So how do you write a buyer persona? In this blog we will show you some tips and tricks that will help you write an accurate buyer persona.
Market Research & Persona Development
The first thing you will need to do is market research. When learning the age, gender, area of living and other details about your potential customer base, you will notice some patterns, which become valuable data on which you can base your marketing decisions.
To tap into the customer base and data you already have, think about sending an email to your customers to learn more about their demographics and habits. In this email, ask general demographic questions as relevant (age, gender, location), but be sure to also ask questions that can be applied immediately to your company’s advertising strategy. For example, if you sell sports equipment and your customers who are located in one city said that they played basketball often, you could tailor your ads in that location to basketball equipment.
The more detail you can include in a buyer persona, the better. Your basketball-playing customers will likely hang around lots of areas like gyms (ex: The YMCA) and outdoor basketball courts. You can use this information for anything from choosing where to show ads, to what kind of imagery your design team might choose for the ad. If you currently advertise at the YMCA, yet you feel that you could make more sales if you let people try out your new ball at outdoor parks, take a look at your data and the buyer personas you’ve built from that data to learn whether it would be best to do both, or to switch gears.
You should also take into account the kinds of questions you ask people. When selling basketballs, it is hard to focus your questions in perfectly, as they can be too focused in on certain scenarios, be too broad, leave out certain elements, or just miss the problem entirely. You should have a dedicated team of people to write these questions thoroughly and completely for the best results.
Product Development & Placement
Be sure to consider your buyers’ strengths and weaknesses. For example, a retired person may be very good at working behind a desk, however they may not be highly proficient at social media. When designing something for that buyer, you would do best to create a website or app that can be accessed through a laptop or desktop, which does not expect your buyer to have to utilize any social media. Make sure your product is something that is within your target audience’s forte, not weakness, or, even better, something which helps them overcome a weakness.
With an eye to your ideal buyer’s demographic information and specific needs, carefully consider their user experience. What quirks will they have that will affect how they feel when they use your product? Your audience, regardless of their age, gender or living area will likely driven to use a product that is easy and simple. It is important to your competitive edge that your product is more user-friendly than your competitors’. But exactly what it is that makes the product user-friendly will depend on the user.
Whether your product is a piece of technology or a physical product, these details are important. A basketball, for example, could come with grips that make it less aerodynamic, but easier to use on an indoor court. If you know your audience likes to play indoors, you’ll know this will make the ball more user-friendly for your buyers.
There is a lot of data to consider when you are building buyer personas, and countless ways to implement the data. Contact us today if you would like to learn more, or if you are ready to tackle buyer persona development together with an experienced team of digital marketers!
