The Power Behind Creating Buyer Personas

When it comes to developing an online marketing strategy it is incredibly important to understand your prospective customers. Having this knowledge will allow you to align all of your marketing decisions with your buyers expectations, ensuring you maximise your online sales. In order to help identify your target market it can be useful to create buyer personas.

What are negative personas?

Whilst a buyer persona looks at your ideal consumer, a negative persona represents who you do not want as a consumer. For example, when you are a running a PPC campaign it is highly effective to refine the process and eliminate any negative keywords. These are keywords that you do not what your advert to show up for when users are searching for queries in search results. The more refined your campaign there is a higher probability of conversion.

How can you use personas?

Personas uncover a range of characteristics about your prospective market, each element helping when devising a marketing strategy. Segmentation allows you to break your market down into four key areas: Demographics, Psychographics, Geographics and Behavioural.

Demographic variables allow you to tailor your advert towards a certain gender or your age. Psychographic variables help write more engaging copy and can be combined with the consumer buying process when creating an email campaign or targeted content for your website. Geographic variables allow you to target your message to a specific area. For example, if you are running a PPC campaign you may filter your advert to only be shown in a specific city or region and understanding behavioural trends such as buyer motivation, buying behaviour and what customers expect from their shopping experience could be the difference between leads and conversions. For example, while 60% of searches are conducted on desktop, the conversion rate tends to be higher on mobile devices.

Your personas can be integrated into your design work. Rather than making assumptions about your users buying expectations, using interviews can help get a real perspective. This information can be used when designing your website to achieve the maximum probability of conversion.

How to research?

In order to get a real interpretation of your customers you need to research the market using a range of tools. If you are an existing company looking to refine your market you may talk with your existing customers and conduct interviews to gain a realistic perspective. If you are a new business you may take a look at how customers interact with your competitors. Other ways include using insightful platforms such as Google analytics, surveymonkey or social media trends such as Facebook insights.

How many should you create?

Businesses will have multiple target markets to consider, therefore it is best to start broad and drill down. For example, a company may target B2B and B2C channels. For this reason it is good practice to create a few variations to maximise your opportunity for conversions. On the other hand, having too many can lead your strategy to become unfocused. It is also important to note that personas will evolve over time and the longer you are in business the more you get to understand what your customers want. Therefore, it is essential for existing businesses to also refine this process.

Conclusion

Consumer mindsets are forever changing as generations evolve and consumer needs continue to change. So if you want to invest all your marketing activity into targeting the right consumers personas can be incredibly powerful for new and existing businesses. Following these steps can help maximise your opportunity for conversion. Begin creating your consumer profile.