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It’s not easy to define your buyer personas. Many marketers struggle with them, it takes time to map them out completely. It also takes a lot of date. Your goal as a marketer is to reach as many relevant visitors as possible. But still, you need to define your target audience in great detail if you want your message to really stand out for them. You probably have some idea, but it’s better to really map them out in a tool or in a document.
Before we dive into the tips: what exactly is a buyer persona? Our definition: It’s a detailed semi-realistic character that for some reason finds your services relevant, and therefor is a potential customer. That persona is created based on information that is relevant to you. Your buyer persona can include information like age, location, needs, interests, goals, challenges, degrees, budgets etc. It’s up to you to determine what information is relevant to define buyer personas. We’d love to share with you our tips for perfecting your buyer personas.
Defining your buyer persona is not a guessing game. You can start from several assumptions, but you will need to test those. Your buyer personas must consist of facts and figures, like historical purchase data or contact data you have.
If you are using a CRM system, then you already have some relevant data. Another way to find out who your potential customers might be is through market research. You can talk to existing customers to gather information. And let’s not forget that your website also generates a lot of data about your visitors. You could run an online survey for example. With a relatively small budget for Facebook advertising, you can get quite some reach.
It’s important to include enough details in your buyer persona. If you don’t use enough details, your buyer persona will not clear enough, and it becomes useless. On the other hand, you als want to avoid being too specific. If you fall into that trap, you will end up with several small target groups with tiny differences. This is bound to overcomplicate things.
If you notice that you have included too many details after all, consider which details you really need. In the end it’s all about balance: include just enough detail to identify your personas in a way that keeps them manageable for your organisation.
Many people see everyone as a target audience. As much as we want everybody in the world to be our customer, it just doesn’t work that way. Your products or services are not for everyone.
So remember to keep the amount of buyer personas you create to a minimum. You cannot serve every possible customer with your organization. Your job is to focus on the ones you CAN serve. The problem is that if you use too many personas, the differences between them will be tiny. It will become more difficult to create distinct segments and target your campaigns.
It makes no sense to define your buyer persona without using them. The fact that this happens a lot really doesn”t surprise us. Using your personas actively takes some getting used to. Just keep in mind that these are the people who are going to buy your products or services. So they are extremely important for your organization: they pay your bills. That’s more than enough reason to use them actively, isn’t it.
So if you’re planning to write a new blog post or work out an email campaign, make sure it aligns with your buyer personas. Your different personas have different needs, questions and challenges. Think about what questions they would ask you in advance or what they would find valuable. It will define the success of your blog post or email campaign.
The world evolves. Your organization is also changing and your products and services are (hopefully) changing along with it. Don’t forget to update your buyer personas regularly. Otherwise, sooner or later you will find out that your marketing efforts are no longer fully aligned with the customer. You will miss out on customers because of that. Review the personas and update them when necessary. This applies to your entire marketing strategy by the way.
Download our free buyer persona worksheet and start building your ideal customer profile
