How to Craft Buyer Personas

How to Craft Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are an integral part of every digital marketing strategy, as they allow marketers to segment their target audience into groups of customers based on why they need and seek out your products and services.

A buyer persona is a profile create to represent the common character traits of these customers and helps deliver a more effective and personalized marketing campaign complete with relevant, timely content.

When you consistently consider your customers’ common traits, you will be able to speak directly to them in the right tone with personalize content, use imagery aligned with their interests and identify tangential interests to integrate with and add on to your marketing strategy. This blog post will walk you through how to craft a buyer persona in five easy steps.

1. Use Website Analytics to Aggregate Data

You can find out a lot of different data about your customers using your website analytics software. The best thing to do is track these data points along a specific amount of time in order to take note of changes or trends in locations, demographics, tangential interests or other sites visited.

2. Create a Fictional Customer Profile

Once you’ve gathered enough data to start seeing trends and similarities among your customer base, you can start to build out a profile of your “perfect” customer. You can craft this profile to be a picture of the data pulled from your website analytics, and boost accuracy by running specific points past customers in surveys or polls.

3. Segment Your Audience into Groups

Let’s say you’re a lifestyle and fitness brand, and you’ve noticed trends around the kinds of workouts your customers like to read about. You can then categorize people based on these similarities into audience groups such as “Yogis,” “Weightlifters” and “Crossfitters.” This will allow you to create a more targeted campaign that interests these groups on a more micro level, giving you more opportunities for personalization.

4. Create Personalized Content

Certain web content management platforms allow for page variants targeted to specific audience segments and local markets. Using features such as this one, you can create hyper-personal content that targets each buyer persona segment. When the content offered is highly relevant to a customer, your brand instantly becomes more attractive and likely to stay top of mind.

5. Track, Test, Refine

As with any other part of an omnichannel marketing strategy, tracking results, testing optimizations and refining things as needed are all extremely important parts of successfully using buyer personas. Be sure to consistently and accurately monitor and record all data points, campaign successes and shortcomings to best understand what is working and what is not. Then, you can look for any consistencies and optimize future campaigns for even greater return.