By Lisa Chappell
Nowadays, 89 percent of customers begin their buying process with a search engine (hello, Google). With the majority of your potential customers relying on online resources, how do you drive traffic from the right crowd? This is where buyer personas come in.
Buyer personas help you effectively connect your value propositions to customer pain points in a language they speak. Personas help you strategically shape your digital marketing campaigns, product/service offerings, and support efforts from the get-go, ultimately impacting your organization’s bottom line.
Personas can help with many facets of your business, but in this article, we concentrate on their application to digital marketing. To give you a deep understanding, we’ve broken it down into two parts: what a persona is in digital marketing and how you can go onto create one (or some) yourself.
1. What Is a Persona in Digital Marketing?
A persona is a holistic profile of your current customers that clearly defines who they are and what drives them to buy, including physical and emotional needs. It’s more than a job position and goes beyond standard demographic questions. Personas drill into your customers’ psyche to understand what really makes them tick.
Personas are critical to digital marketing because they attract the right audience to your website by helping you develop effective messaging and provide information that aligns with how your customers think and feel.
Not only do buyer personas provide a wealth of knowledge to your customers externally, but they also act as a beacon internally for your marketing, sales, and support teams to look to—in turn, aligning their efforts and connecting them back to your organization’s overarching goals.
Creating and utilizing personas in digital marketing benefits you by enabling you to:
- Be more strategic and plan for marketing deliverables that will move the needle
- Drive relevant traffic to your website with visits from those that are truly looking for what you offer
- Feed sales more qualified leads and help them have smarter conversations based on each persona type
- Document marketing deliverables and connect them to company goals
Furthermore, personas can help you decide:
- Which media outlets to target
- What products or services you should develop
2. How to Create personas for Digital Marketing
In order to create impactful personas, you need to ask the right people the right questions. It takes time to create and refine personas, so a good rule is to start with three personas and develop more later on. Here’s a three-step process to follow, which lays out whom to speak to as well as what open-ended questions to ask:
1. Begin with internal interviews. Talk with your teams that have the most face time with customers. Explain to them what personas are and why their input is critical to creating them.
Here are the most common departments to interview, as well as questions to ask for each: