We’ve all heard about the potential benefits of creating personas during the marketing state of the product life cycle. As Ardath Albee puts it, it is a composite of the key segment that you want to target. Buyer personas have been known to increase your click-through rate by five times. This makes sense because personalization is an essential marketing tool.
Buyer personas help you segment your visitors based on various criteria and then apply targeted marketing efforts to convert those visitors into sales. Online marketing companies benefit from this strategy as it helps them focus on the solutions that customers are seeking and provide those solutions.
Let’s discuss how you can create and optimize buyer personas for your online business.
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative Personas
Personas are created based on research, including surveys, interviews, data analysis, and trends. It means that you can use qualitative data to develop a qualitative persona or do some severe crunching to create a quantitative persona.
Qualitative Personas
They are a result of surveys and interviews. You can have customers fill forms when they visit your website or post surveys with enticing prices for those who respond. You can also seek permission from customers to conduct a short telephone interview to answer a few questions. This will help you understand the kind of customers who visit your webpage and who have bought your product or browsed through it.
Quantitative Personas
These are based on collecting customer data based on their browsing history and purchases. It includes statistics such as the click-through rate on your site, the traffic to a particular page on your website, the time spent on the webpage, and similar numbers. You will then analyze these data to spot emerging trends and patterns that will, in turn, help you identify the market segments that you should focus on for marketing.
Each comes with advantages and drawbacks. So, we suggest that you use a combination of both to overcome the drawbacks.
Where Do You Start?
The best place to begin interviewing is by starting with your current customers. Since they are already engaged with the company, they will be willing to share information with you. You can also ask for referrals. We all know that referrals are one step closer to becoming your customers. So, it is a good idea to take their inputs in creating buyer personas.
Finally, there are prospective customers that you plan to target soon. They may not agree to share information with you directly. In this case, you can collect information, such as browsing history on your website, etc. This will provide valuable inputs to the buyer personas you create. It will also help you optimize an existing persona to fit a new market segment.
Identify The Objective of Your Persona
Every business is conducted with an end goal in mind. It could be profit maximization or increased global presence. Similarly, every marketing activity should also have an end objective. You need to identify the goal you want your buyer personas to achieve. It could be to segment customers based on food preferences (such as vegan or vegetarian), geographic segmentation, based on age, gender, income, or education.
Segmentation can be based on four categories; demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and geographic. Let’s say your product is a high-end, custom-built mattress. Then, your buyer persona’s objective will be to segment customers based on demographics and geography. The sub-segments would be people from high-income groups, and those who live in upscale neighborhoods.
Personas Can Be B2B and B2C
Almost all businesses can use buyer personas to segment their customers. The use of personas is not limited to retail. Even companies that supply to other businesses can create their buyer personas using the methods mentioned above. Some industries that benefit from personas are consultants, online activities, brick-and-mortar retail stores, business-to-business sales, business-to-consumer sales, service providers, and manufacturers.
Be it either a product or service; whether your clients are individuals or conglomerates, you can make your business take a giant leap with optimized buyer personas. The fascinating part is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are online marketing companies that will help you create and optimize these buyer personas to make your online marketing campaigns a triumph.
Connect Buyer Personas to Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a fundamental way to capture a fresh set of the targeted audience. You can use things like blogs, articles, e-books, white papers, and videos relevant to your business to attract visitors.
Let’s continue with the mattress example above. Let’s say you have a customer looking for articles on memory foam, and land on your website. They will be able to get the information they are looking for, and you can have a small pop-up questionnaire to have them fill out their details.
This will help you build a persona based on the customers who search for articles on memory foam. Every time a customer submits their data, you gain more insights on your buyer persona.
Optimization Is Crucial
Marketing is never static. It is dynamic, and you need to tweak and optimize, to stay current continuously. The same applies to buyer personas. Buyer’s preferences change over time, and new buyers join the customer base regularly. It means you need to continue to adjust your personas based on unique preferences and buying patterns.
What Is Not A Buyer Persona?
We’ve understood what goes into creating a buyer persona, but it’s equally important to know what does not. The job title or roles of customers are not their personas. For example, a stay at home mom is not a persona, as it is a broad category. It will help if you narrow it down.
Get details like the number of children she has, her work experience, her hobbies and interests, and if she works from home. It will help build an accurate persona that will add value to your marketing strategy.
Marketing is all about knowing what your customers want and delivering a message that meets their needs. Buyer personas can help online marketing companies create a representation of their target market segment. Also, this allows for targeted marketing with a personalized message.