If you want to reach as many real customers as possible with your marketing, you will need to create buyer personas that represent your ideal buyers. The more detailed and precise you can make your personas, the better you’ll be able to tailor your marketing collateral to convince people in your market to become customers.
Discovering Your Niche
Some businesses get their start from recognizing a need in their market and fulfilling that need with their products and services. Companies often depend on buyer personas to get started, especially if the need they’re fulfilling is very specific. This happens often with new developments in software. Other times, businesses start based on the pursuit of one’s passion and skill in their trade, such as a baker looking to open a shop in the suburbs.
While a new software business may have more specific buyer personas compared to a bakery, both will need to fine-tune their marketing based on how they uniquely serve their respective markets. For instance, the software company would heavily depend on knowing specific buyer personas right from the beginning. But the new bakery owner could find out through on-going research once they open that their market has a surprisingly high demand for gluten-free pastries.
So, how do you generate buyer personas through research?
Gather Customer Feedback
One great way to fine-tune your buyer personas is to have your staff report what customers are saying. Are customers happy with your services so far? Are there common complaints or pain points? These are the sorts of questions you can answer by consistently asking staff what they are hearing in phone calls, through emails, and during in-person interactions.
Another way to gather this information is using a survey. Send an online survey to past and current clients. You can even send a survey to your lead list to help determine why they haven’t purchased your product or service. Knowing why you have or haven’t someone’s business can be very useful when figuring out how to reach the right people in the right way.
Figure Out Your Customers’ Demographics
The methods for gaining demographic information can vary widely depending on the type of company and the scale they’re operating at, but it will be extremely helpful in tailoring your marketing.
You’ll want to gather information about the age, gender, ethnicity, income level, and other identifying traits of your customers. How they prefer to be contacted, what they do in their spare time, and where they hang out online are also important.
Using Analytics to Create Buyer Personas
One indispensable tool you’ll want to use is your analytics. You’ll be able to look at demographic information about the users who interact with your digital marketing channels and how they interact with them. You can also see what days and times they are more active on your website and your social media, which can help determine the best times to connect with them through new blogs, social posts, and online advertising.
Once you have collected all of this information, you can create buyer personas that illustrate your ideal clients and provide clues into why they may or may not do business with you, what offers or other perks might appeal to them, and how and when to best reach out to them. Then this valuable insight can be used to make your marketing efforts more effective and lead to more business.
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