When it comes to running a successful business, one of the most important factors to consider is to know your customer. Before indulging in paid advertising and content marketing, it is really necessary for any business to know exactly who the buyers are. The knowledge and understanding of the buyers will imperatively help you maximize the return-on-investment for advertising and content marketing.
So, in order to know your customer, you need to create buyer personas. Creating buyer personas has become a standard in many products based organizations and retail service businesses. Yet, many startups don't know much about how to create buyer personas for their business and how it is helpful to enhance the user base. Let’s know more about buyer personas.
What Is Buyer Personas?
Buyer Personas are mostly referred as a fictional and generalized representation of your ideal customers. Buyer personas comprise of generalized characters that help in building an ideal picture of your business in the market. These fictional characters usually encompass not only demographic information such as name, age, location, etc., but also psychographic information such as reasons, interests for buying and product related concerns.How To Create Buyer Personas And Why It Is Important For Your Business?
In order to create effective buyer personas, you first need to perform in-depth market research and gather the feedback from the actual customer base. As a business, you can create multiple buyer personas as per your offered products and services. Buyer personas will help in representing how different customers or audience are using the products and services offered by your brand. This will help your business in creating more audience-targeted content that can relate to your customers. It gradually makes your business campaigns successful.There are multiple strategies that help in creating buyer personas. However, here we will discuss the most common methodologies used by multiple businesses in gathering data. The common data to create buyer personas can be gathered from online surveys, phone interviews, research, analytics of your targeted customer. With the help of these resources, any business can gather dynamic and detailed response for their brand.
The interview questions and analytics can be customized as per the audience group and both of these cover a wide range of questions related to customer behavior. Whereas analyzing and gathering the data directly from the clients or with the help of website’s analytics can be a time-consuming task for any business. Yet, sometimes it is not completely capable of giving the entire picture of your business’s customer base. However, you can also utilize these practical methods to gather the information to create buyer personas:
- Take regular feedback from your sales team for the most interactive leads. Ask for the generalization they can make about the different types of customers whom you are serving best.
- While creating online survey forms on your website, you can use multiple types of form fields that has captured the important persona information.
- A brief look through the contacts database can also help you uncover the current trends and gives you a brief understanding of how the certain leads or audiences find and consume your content.
Buyer personas are helping companies in multiple aspects, i.e. sales, marketing, services, and products. Personas help your business to cut down on heavy resources and marketing techniques and simultaneously it eliminates the waste content that doesn’t reach the right audience. In order to run a successful business, it is really necessary to have an in-depth understanding of buyer personas, as it helps in driving content creation for promotion, product development, sales follow-up, and anything that is related to customer acquisition and retention.
Buyer personas help your business in understanding your customers in a better manner. Once you got to know your customer, it will be easier for you to tailor the content, marketing strategies, product development, enhance the quality of the services to fulfill specific needs, customer behavior and concerns related to products and services of different groups.
A business’s social media presence is very important to reach the new heights of success. Social presence analyzes the followers’ behavioral patterns, their interaction with your brand, their demographic and psychographic information. So, let’s have a look at how data from social media can help you create buyer personas:
Facebook:
Facebook has millions of users from all across the world and it plays a very powerful role in social media marketing. It can also be considered as an authentic tool that helps in collecting data to create your buyer personas. Above all, one of many advantages of creating a Facebook page is the access to Facebook Insights.Facebook Insights is an analytic tool that can help you in finding and analyzing the demographic as well as psychographic information of the users. The psychographic information comprises of the data of the people who visit your page and click on the Facebook posts and ads such as age, location, gender, language, etc. Whereas the demographic information will help you to find out the user engagement on your Facebook page, such as audience interaction, the number of likes, clicks, and comments made by the users on your Facebook post or ads.
Facebook Insights data helps you in getting a better understanding of the audience that interacts with your Facebook posts. Moreover, it allows you to decide on the future posts and helps you in increasing the user engagement. You can easily create buyer personas based on the demographic and psychographic information provided by Facebook Insights.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a professionally oriented social network. The users of LinkedIn represents themselves in a perfect manner when it comes to interacting with other businesses professionally. LinkedIn is considered as the most authentic professional social network to gather data, as users provide authentic and detailed information which can be helpful in creating buyer personas.The professional groups on LinkedIn is a great way to understand and analyze about what people are talking about in specific industries. Professionals can openly share and discuss their thought process on these LinkedIn groups. You can gather the information of trending topics from these LinkedIn groups that can help you in performing buyer persona research.
Twitter:
Similar to Facebook, Twitter has also reached to millions of users. With the help of Twitter Analytics tool, you can gather demographic information of your brand’s followers. The information comprises of user’s primary language, location, gender, etc. With all these gathered information, you can have a better understanding of audience behavior that will help in tailoring appropriate and relevant content for your Twitter ads and posts.Twitter Analytics also shows the primary field of interest of your brand’s followers. Moreover, it also provides Device Categories information. It shows the percentage of the audience browsing your brand’s Twitter profile via multiple devices such as desktop, laptops, iOS or Android devices, etc. The device category data can be helpful for eCommerce businesses.
Twitter and Facebook, both can help in creating a different kind of personas. A business can easily compare the success of the post on the same topic by posting it on these two platforms. It helps you in getting a clear impression of the audience you are trying to reach with your content. There are different types of brand follower on Facebook and Twitter. The brand followers on Twitter appreciates quick snippets whereas the brand followers on Facebook appreciate the deeper content and are more inclined towards pictures and videos or small clips.
Moreover, you can also use Google Analytics user segmentation. With the help of Google Analytics, you can determine the track of the user from where they have reached you through the social network. Google Analytics can help you understand the browsing behavior of the user, their knowledge, and interaction towards your brand. It also helps you determine how much they are engaged with your social network platform or site.
These are the basic tactics which are being used by top brands to create buyer personas. While applying all these marketing strategies, always remember that buyers are multi-faceted human beings. They tend to compare the services and products offered by your brand with any other brand. By creating well-developed buyer personas, you can make the buyer to visit your website and perform an action.
Author's Bio:
Ritesh Patil is the co-founder of Mobisoft Infotech that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology. He loves technology, especially mobile technology. He’s an avid blogger and writes on mobile application. He works in a leading android development company with skilled android app developers that has developed innovative mobile applications across various fields such as Finance, Insurance, Health, Entertainment, Productivity, Social Causes, Education and many more and has bagged numerous awards for the same.
