Buyer personas are the foundation of your marketing strategy. When you give a name (or three!) to your target audience, you’re better able to attract the highest quality leads: the ones that convert. Creating a buyer persona is like creating a fictional character that represents one part of your ideal customer base. This process is crucial, and it’s worth putting energy into making it happen. But that doesn’t mean the process has to be difficult.

Here is a step-by-step guide to begin giving your target audience a personality.

1. Dig into the Research

Use Google Analytics and the analytic tools on your other social media platforms to begin gathering data about your existing audience. Instagram and Facebook give detailed reports on the demographics of your audience including their age, interests, hobbies, and so on.

2. Begin with the Basics (Demographics)

Once you’ve gathered your data, you want to really deep-dive into the online habits of different age groups. Different generations use the internet differently. It could be where they get their news, where they look for information or reviews, or their one and only source for media and entertainment.

Gender may affect the goals and pain points that your product aims to fulfill or alleviate. Income, education, and profession can also deeply affect personal values. Your audience’s lifestyle will impact how they allocate money, how much leisure time they have, and the areas of their lives they want to improve. Once you understand all of those things, it will become clear how your products or services can help them solve problems.

Understanding the interests of your target audience means you can create everything from targeted blog content to entire ad campaigns. This information is going to be the backbone of your strategy because you have to meet your customers where they are. Most people don’t care about the specific features of your offering– it’s all about determining how you can provide benefits in practice.

3. Identify the How, When, and Why of Your Target Audience

Once you’ve analyzed all of your data, you can begin putting it together to answer these crucial questions:

• How are they finding your company? Use your data to construct a detailed buyer journey.
• When do they become customers? Find out how long someone spends on the buyer journey before converting into a paying customer.
• When in their life are they going to be compelled to buy your product? It could be moving into a new house, starting renovations, or when they’re ready for a career change.
• Why does this customer buy your product? You should be able to name your unique selling point and pinpoint exactly why this particular customer persona is attracted to your product.
• Do you appeal to their values, assist with their goals, or mitigate their frustrations? Having a sales approach geared towards each of these options is critical.

4. Put It All Together

After you’ve conducted your research, you should be able to create a character outline that includes name, age, and other demographic information, as well as values, hobbies, location, and maybe even things like favorite color.

The more personal and detailed your persona, the higher the likelihood that your company can meet your dream customer and increase conversion rates. With personalized content, you’ll also be able to maintain a happy fanbase and create customers that return again and again.

Marketing Services for Small Business

There are a few places people get stuck when creating and using buyer personas:

• Collecting information about the current audience
• Analyzing that data to create actionable insights
• Finding the most effective way to reach a buyer persona
• Building funnels that convert people after you reach them

If your business is having trouble getting attention from the right people (or if you just don’t have time to focus on that), let’s connect.

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