Do You Know Your Customer?
AN INTRODUCTION TO CREATING A BUYER PERSONA
Do you know your customer? I ask this question to many starting entrepreneurs. Not to my surprise, they don’t know much about their customers. This is because many starting entrepreneurs don’t have a direction. Now I give props to them because they were able to start something that other people are too afraid to do. But since they have started, their new question is, “Now what?”
While it’s true that they’ve found a solution to a problem that people need, it isn’t true that everyone will buy that product or service that they’re selling. Now if you find yourself in this situation, don’t worry because we’ll be talking about finding your ideal customer. We’ll do this by first creating a buyer persona.
What is a Buyer Persona?
First, we should talk about what a buyer persona is and why you should create one. When it comes to finding insights on your customer, you want to create a buyer persona and an empathy map. We’ll only be talking about creating a buyer persona, but if you do want to learn how to make an empathy map, then connect with me here on LinkedIn where you’ll learn all about digital marketing and get notified when a new article has been released.
Buyer personas or customer avatars are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customer. What that means is that you’ll create an imaginary person whose characteristics are supposed to represent a general idea of the customers you want to attract. This works great if you want to reach the proper audience. Benefits of having a buyer persona include:
Knowing the right people to focus your time and ads on
Having the perfect customers buy your products and/or your services
Creating the proper content for your persona
Optimizing everything for your specific persona
Segmenting your contact list by buyer persona
How to Create a Buyer Persona
To create a buyer persona, you need to gather mixed data of information. Everyone has their way of making a buyer persona, but they all have key pieces of information:
Background
Demographics
Identifiers
Goals
Challenges
Sales Objections
How You Can Help
Actual Quotes
Collecting Data
Now that you know what data you need to collect, you need to think about how you’ll be getting it. There are three ways, research analytics, give surveys, or have interviews. The data you receive has to be quantifiable and as close to your ideal customer as possible. This means you probably don’t want to focus too much on followers of your social media or blog, as they’re not the type of person who will eventually become a customer.
Analytics
It’s best to use analytics to learn specific demographics like age and gender. The most popular analytics dashboard is Google Analytics. You can also use dashboards from social media like Facebook and Instagram Insights. Websites have their own dashboards as well.
You can get a great amount of information using analytics. However, if you want the extra details, then you move on to surveys and interviews.
Surveys
Surveys can secure the information you’ve received from analytics. It can be given in person or through email. Now if you want a better chance of people taking your surveys, you should try to reward them for completing the survey. You can give a free product, discount coupons, and more.
Interviews
Interviews can be the most intimate out of the three. This is because you can learn and understand your customers better as it’s more conversational than a survey. You can actually interview both ideal and nonideal customers to compare and learn traits that make the best customers and ones that do not fit. Make sure you tailor and elaborate your interview questions to receive the best feedback.
Put It All Together
Now that you’ve collected all the information you needed, it’s time to put it all together. Find what they all have in common and put it in a document or slide. The final and best step is to give it a name. It can be any name you want, the more memorable the better.
That’s how to create a buyer persona. If you like what you’ve just learned, share this article and subscribe to our newsletter as I talk more about digital marketing. Also, if you need any help with web design, social media, or content marketing, book an appointment with me and I'll help you in your branding journey. This is Samuel James of Inbound Point and I hope we’ll talk again soon.