When creating a new website it is essential to fully understand whom you are addressing to. While this is obvious, few organizations have taken the time and resources to identify the representations of the ideal customer, or as we often find in digital marketing terms, the buyer personas.
Hubspot, the well known inbound marketing and sales platform provides us with a clear definition of buyer personas: buyer or marketing personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.
Personas are a useful tool in marketing, sales and product development because they identify the customer we’re aiming to have, while associating our customers to real persons. Achieving an in depth understanding of the buyer persona(s) is important to planning content creation, driving traffic to your website and ultimately increasing sales and ROI. Depending on your industry and type of business, you could have from one or two personas, up to as many as 10-20.
However a buyer persona is much more than a simple description of your customer. It includes valuable insights concerning what your buyers think about doing business with you, such as real quotes from people, potential difficulties or problems your customers may have faced, or needs that they may seek to gratify.
So, how do we create buyer persona(s)? Research, surveys and interviews with your actual customers are the safest way, since marketers often imagine their ideal customers a lot different than they proved to be in reality. Gender, age, professional background, financial situation, level of education, purpose of purchasing your product or service and shopping habits are useful elements when creating a buyer persona. However, depending on the industry you might include other questions, such as hobbies, interests or working habits.
Sometimes it is also smart to create a negative persona – the representative of who you don’t want as a customer – because this will enable you to better identify your target audience. Negative personas may be early or late adopters for your product or service, or even too expensive to attract online.
Interesting in finding out more? Contact us today, so we can help you creating the personas for your business!