Is Buyer Persona Important? How To Create a Buyer Persona?

Do you know who your business’s buyer personas are? Because I have just found mine.

My life has changed tremendously ever since I met Taylor.

Taylor is my buyer persona. She is the imaginary buyer that I’ve created based on a little information that I’ve gathered from using Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Alexa.

I’m pretty sure you may have heard about the term “buyer persona” every now and then. But do you really know how important it is to profile your buyer persona?.

Firstly, what is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed description of your target customer.

Having a buyer persona is extremely crucial for every business. In fact, it is the first thing that every business should look into before stepping their foot into content marketing.

When you have a clear audience in mind, you will write to cater for your audience, instead of catering for a weekly quota. Let’s admit it, as a content writer, you have deadlines to meet and quotas to fill, both can make you writing blindly without providing real sustenance.

But when you have your buyer persona in mind, you will slowly get to know what kind of content works for them and write better in the long run.

Buyer’s today are spending more time researching and reading online reviews before making any purchase.

Source: ReachLocal

As you can see from the diagram above, buyer’s today are spending more time reading and researching on the Internet. Hence, this is making them more sophisticated and knowledgeable than they were before. Without a constructive digital marketing plan in place, your business is more likely to be on the verge of getting kick out by the major players in the market.

And I’m pretty sure, that is the last thing you would want to hear. Am I right? If your answer is yes. Then read on.

How Buyer Persona Improve My Content Marketing

Like I have mentioned it earlier, Taylor is actually the profile of my ideal customer. If you have been following our blog, we at SEOPressor have mentioned it before that we’ve just started doing content marketing not too long ago before we found our buying persona. If you wish to know more about that story, you can read that full story here.

Back then, I’m just like everyone else in our content marketing team. I didn’t know much about content marketing and I also didn’t know that building a buyer persona was so important.

And sadly enough, the content that I’ve posted during the first month did not bring in any good organic traffic.

The organic traffic is very low during the first month.

After two weeks of some heartbreaking moments and sleepless nights…I finally came to know that projecting a buyer persona in my mind is the key to reaching out to the right targeted group of audience.

And then with a little background research on our company’s buyer persona – I finally found Taylor!

Ever since I have always kept her in mind before deciding on what to write for my upcoming blog post. That is extremely useful because that allows me to strike a balance when planning for the purpose of each article.

Whether the purpose of my article is to inform Taylor about a new launching of our company’s product, or to provide her with some actionable steps to solve her problems, or to sell her something, my content objective can now be set clearly.

For instance, let’s look at some of the content titles that I’ve created before and after the existence of Taylor. Let’s look at the differences.

Situation 1: Before I created Taylor

• A Peek Into The Mind Of A Successful Growth Hacker | (Social Shares 46)
• 6 Things We Can Learn From Growth Hackers That Will Change Your Perspective Forever | (Social Shares 48)
• Why Co-citation and Co-occurrence Are Such Big Deal | (Social Shares 12)

Takeaways: As you can see from all the above titles, the social shares counts are quite low as compared to the ones below.

Situation 2: After I’ve created Taylor

• [Case Study] Secret About Meta Description That Can Triple Your Click-Through Rate | (Social Shares 221)
• 32 Simple Ways To Increase More Traffic & Visitors To Your Blog | (Social Shares 232)
• 7 Powerful Visual Content That Will Increase Social Engagement For Your Business | (Social Shares 103)

Takeaways: As you can you from these three titles, the social shares counts have increased tremendously.

So, what can I get out of these two situations?

Readers prefer the latter 3 titles better than the former 3 titles. Why?

As you can see, I’ve given them a promise that if they were to click on these titles, they can really expect to get some insights or some actionable steps that can answer to their problems.

So can you see the whole point now?

Readers are more willing to share my post if they think that my article has helped them to solve some of their problems.

Furthermore, the more they share the better chances of me reaching out to more targeted readers.

Hence, reaching out to more targeted readers also means that there will be higher chances of driving more targeted traffic to my blog post.

And in the end, turning them from lead into our loyal customers.

Targeted Audience = Potential Buyer (Lead)
Potential Buyer = Loyal Customer (Taylor)

Now, before I proceed to the next section, let’s have a recap of what are the some of the importance of having to create your buyer persona.

• Know who are your targeted audiences
• Develop a more personalized approach and to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy
• Turn them from leads into your loyal customers

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Now, let’s look at some of the steps on how to create and develop buyer personas.

Step 1: Do a little research on the background of your buyer persona

How to develop buyer personas? There are some of the tools that can help you to find out some of the basic demographics information by using Facebook insights, Alexa, and Google Analytics.

Demographics are information like age, race, gender, education, type of occupation or probably the region that they are living in.

As you can see from Alexa’s screenshot above, it shows you a little idea on which particular gender frequently visit your website/ blog, their educational background and also their browsing locations.

Also, if you have your Facebook business page, you can proceed to Facebook insights and to look at some basic background information about your persona.

Like I said, regardless of what industry you are in, knowing some of this basic demographic information of your buyer personas will give you a better idea on how to launch or market a new product to them.

Below are some of the insights on examples of persona you can get out of this information:

• Gender – this information allow you to know who are the majority of your buyer persona, whether is a he or she.

• Age/ education/ type of education – this information give you a rough idea on how well versed a buyer possibly is in the topic you’re discussing.

• Race/ region – this information give you a general idea of-of the location and also the culture that your buyers are from, hence allowing you to take into consideration of using a universal marketing strategy. Divise different marketing strategies to market in different continents for the most appropriate approach that caters to different cultural sensitivity.

Step 2: Job titles, roles and also company information.

Understanding some of this information will give you a better idea on what kind of goals, responsibilities or challenges that your buyers are facing on a daily basis. All this information can be gathered from your existing customer database (assuming you have an existing business).

Is either you can set up a customer survey form on your website or you can call up some of your existing customers to find out all the answers based on the questions set.

However, remember to thank your customers by sending them a special gift or discount voucher to those who have taken the time that answered to all your survey questionnaires.

This is a way of showing them that you cherished and valued the time and feedback they’ve given to you.

Step 3: List the qualities that your buyer persona values and what they fear.

By listing down some of the qualities of what they values or fear about, it will help us to derive what will be some of the most common objections that our buyer may bring up during a sales process. And understanding such objections will allow us to know our buyer personas in marketing and thus able to implement a better intuitive marketing strategy to deal with those rejections.

Example:
For Taylor, our buyer persona, below are just some of the things she values and fear most in life:

What she valued most:

• Appreciation
• Business Minded
• Family
• Happiness
• Perfection

What she feared most:

• Disappointment
• Failure
• Procrastination

So, as you can see, listing down some of these qualities help me to understand what will be some of the things that she values the most and what will be some of her biggest fears.

Like I said, knowing some of this questions to develop personas will really be very helpful for me to plan out what will be the purpose or direction of my next upcoming topic.

Step 4: Next, you can sum all this up in an elevator pitch.

How to use personas? With all the information gathered from above, this will give you an idea on how to prepare your sales pitch to your intended buyer.

Imagine that you have one minute to tell this person why your business is relevant to them. What would you say? This is your elevator pitch.

Even when it comes to crafting the sales message on your landing page, your elevator pitch has to be simple, clear and direct, so that you will be able to convince them to make an immediate purchase from you.

Step 5: Give your buyer persona a name.

Like I’ve mentioned it earlier, you can name your buyer however you want it. Just like how I named my buyer persona, Taylor. Giving her a real name allow me to envision her and give me a better opportunity to take a step closer in understanding all her needs and wants.

Taylor is my buyer persona example. If you can envision your buyer as a real person, it allows you to step into their shoes and to see things from their perspectives. Hence, you will be able to develop better strategy specially catered to them.

Conclusion

So by now, I hope you have a better understanding of what buyer persona really is and how important it is to your business. As a final note, I hope you can remember that the key to developing a strategic digital marketing plan is to identify the right buyer personas for your business. Also, you need to always have your buyer persona in mind, just like how I always have Taylor in my mind.

This post was originally written by Ben and published on Nov 17, 2015. It was most recently updated on June 26, 2019.

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About Allysa

Allysa is always eager to learn something new whenever she got some free time and that includes SEO and inbound marketing. She also has a passion for traveling and discovering the unknowns.