Before you begin marketing your brand online or anywhere else, you need to take a few key steps in identifying your buyer persona. The buyer persona is basically your target audience. You need to understand what exactly a buyer persona is, learn how you can identify your brand’s buyer persona and discover how you can address their needs in order to effectively sell your product or service.
There’s much more to understanding your buyer persona than identifying the typical person who purchases your products or services. Understand that the buyer persona is a detailed description of the customer who buys from your company. It is critical not to include those customers who may wander into your store or visit your website, as they may be shoppers and not real buyers. By addressing your buyer persona, you’ll be targeting your marketing to a specific type of person with the knowledge that this will help you find more customers with a similar persona.
So now that you know what a buyer persona is, how do you identify your specific buyer persona? The only way is to do research on your actual customer base. The following are some of the things you need to take note of:
- Gender – Marketing to men is a lot different from marketing to women, which means you need to figure out which gender makes up the majority of your buyer persona. For example, if you sell pink figure skates, then it’s highly likely the database of your customers is highly skewed female.
- Age – The age of your buyer persona is just as important as the gender. Marketing to young adults or senior citizens is much different from marketing to middle aged adults.
- Financial situation – Although figuring out the profession of your buyer persona can be incredibly helpful, it’s also incredibly difficult. A more attainable bit of information is the financial situation of your average customer as it relates to spending for your product or service. Since it’s unlikely that you know how much money your average customer has in their bank account – instead, you may know how much they are willing to pay.
- Purpose – Figuring out why your customers buy your products or services is an important part of defining your buyer persona. You need to know the purpose for which your customer uses your product or service. This may seem obvious, but some products have multiple uses. Figuring out the most common use for your product will help you focus your marketing efforts more accurately.
- Shopping habits – This may seem unrelated, but knowing what else your customers are buying can help you figure out what else you can offer them.
Read more: 5 Social Selling Tips for Your Sales People
Once you have the information necessary to paint a detailed portrait of your buyer persona, you’ll need to actually reach these potential customers with your marketing. The following are a few tips for using the information you’ve gathered about your buyer persona to market to them:
- Address the specific persona – Instead of using “you” you can speak directly to your buyer persona by saying something like “a woman in her 30s.”
- Address the issue – Once you understand your buyer persona, you’ll be able to address their specific issues, which allows them to engage with you in a more relatable manner.
- Address beliefs – More detailed info about your buyer persona’s beliefs allows you to be much more specific in offering your product or service as a solution. For example, if your company sells healthy foods and your buyer persona consists of mothers, then you can say your product “provides children with vitamins that they need and don’t get at school,” as opposed to something vague like “this product is a health choice for you.”
Knowing your buyer persona and learning how to use that information to pursue new buyers is an integral part of marketing your brand in a successful manner, whether you are doing so with your website or with traditional offline or print campaigns.
