As a brand, you may want to ask yourself, how well do you really know your customers? Who your audience is can be defined by buyer personas, which are described as a detailed representation of your target customers–their demographics, interests, the media they consume, and so on.
Discovering not only who your ideal customer is but also what their interests and habits are. This is the best way to personalize your campaigns, products, or services effectively. Statistics show that 71% of companies that exceed lead generation and revenue goals have documented buyer personas. This shows how important it is to know who your customers are and how you can attract them.
At REM Web Solutions, we have insight into enhancing your marketing techniques, ensuring your brand reaches the right eyes. Let’s look at the importance of buyer personas, and how to implement them into your marketing strategy.
What is a Buyer Persona?
More than just a simple customer profile of a name, location, or gender, buyer personas are a much more intricate pile of information that determines the right audience you want to engage.
By conducting marketing research and using real data from your existing customers, personas can dictate more about your brand's existing customers. Here is a list of psychographic personas and behavioural personas you may want to consider when creating a buyer persona:
- Interests and hobbies
- Basic demographics (e.g. age, gender, location)
- Products they may be interested in buying
- Purchase history
- Shopping habits (e.g. online, apps, retail stores)
- Where content is consumed (e.g. social media channels, TV, podcasts)
- Online communities
- Challenges (e.g. pain points, finances, accessibility)
- Social justice causes they belong to
Why are buyer personas so important? With a more in-depth understanding of who your customer base is, marketers can create personalized campaign ads that specifically target their audience. Beyond basic demographics, searching deeper into your customer's beliefs, priorities, and behaviours provides detailed insights into their wants and needs. Using this knowledge to your advantage allows for the personalization of buyer personas, which will help you distinguish how to keep a loyal customer base.
Personalized ads aren’t just preferred, they are the new standard. Salesforce reports that 52% of consumers are more likely to switch brands if companies don't personalize communication with them. Developing personas creates a targeted approach, allowing your business to design a unique marketing strategy for each customer.
By understanding these detailed personas, REM Web Solutions can help you find your ideal demographic. Having a personalized approach will boost engagement, drive sales, and reduce your marketing spend, delivering measurable results.
Research and Development of Buyer Personas
By thoroughly collecting data, you can create robust buyer personas through multiple research methods. Let’s look at the different ways of developing buyer personas:
Interviews
Direct customer communication provides qualitative insights that can answer many of your questions. Learning about their behaviours, such as why they may shop online instead of in-store, or their interests and hobbies, can reveal a lot about not just what they do, but why. Interviews aren’t just to seek information, but to create a relationship with your customers allowing them to express their opinions in a safe space and provide honest information.
Surveys
A smart business will ask questions. Surveys are an accessible way to collect data. Gaining quantitative insights from a broad audience can help your business narrow down key characteristics that will help you target your marketing campaigns. Customers want to feel like their voices are heard, showing your customers that you care about their interests, and how you can better personalize your ads will help you develop buyer personas.
Social Media
Tracking analytics on social media is an indispensable way to find engagement trends, preferences, and behaviours that aren’t available through direct interactions like surveys and interviews. When it comes to numbers, algorithms or how much time is spent on an app, the use of analytics can play a helpful part in determining buyer personas. More than just tracking data, using social media for your business gains insight into what platforms your brand finds the most success on.
To understand customer needs, REM Web Solutions can equip your business with our data-driven approach, creating targeted marketing strategies that will not only expand your customer base but also set you apart from your competitors.
Applying Marketing Strategies with Buyer Personas
Refining your social media strategy is best through means of proper communication. Applying buyer persona marketing strategies can be an effective way to transform how you reach your target audience through these applications:
Email Marketing
Knowing your personas allows you to create segmented emails that target different audience groups based on specific interests, behaviours, and lifestyles. Higher personalization increases the likelihood of click-through rates and reduces the amount of unsubscribers.
Content Marketing
To create engaging and relatable content, it is important to ask yourself what your audience’s preferences are–do they engage better with video or written content? Where do they consume media? Customizing your content marketing increases the relevance of your business, enhancing engagement and loyalty.
Social Media
Understanding your different buyer personas can grant you access to peak hours for posting content or which platforms your customers are most active on. Whether it's short-form video content for a younger audience or thought leadership articles on LinkedIn, personas can determine a proper posting schedule and the best format for content.
Advertising
Using buyer personas creates more strategic advertisements. Ads can be designed with appealing messages that interest the needs of different personas, increasing conversion rates. An example of a strategic ad may be mentioning cost efficiency to a budget-conscious persona. Creating a strategic ad that appeals to buyer personas doesn’t just boost revenue, but it also makes ad spending worth every penny.
Learning who your buyer personas are can help market your business through tailored messages and specific channels. At REM Web Solutions, we can help you discover what aligns with your audience’s preferences to ensure every piece of content creates an impact.
Buyer Persona Challenges and Solutions
When implementing buyer personas into your marketing strategy, they can sometimes be met with challenges. Here are some common errors businesses make, along with some practical solutions:
Data Collection
It is sometimes hard to gather enough relevant information to create a detailed persona. The key is to compile as many sources as you can. As discussed earlier, using customer surveys, interviews, and social media interactions, along with transactional data can help determine an accurate representation of buyer personas.
Overgeneralization
Just like having no buyer personas, having a broad number of personas can be just as ineffective. A wide range of personas may seem like a clever idea at first, but when your business isn’t connected to a specific audience, it creates an unestablished link between you and potential customers. To combat this, refer to our list of psychographic and behavioural personas and use it as a tool instead of relying solely on general demographics. Regularly updating personas with new data also helps narrow down your results.
Integration into Marketing
After developing personas, adding them to your existing marketing strategy can cause some confusion. It’s important to have a marketing team that can apply persona insights effectively across multiple platforms and advertisements. This task may be daunting, which is why our marketing team at REM Web Solutions can help this transition run smoothly.
Alignment Across Departments
To implement a cohesive strategy, involving multiple departments such as sales, customer service, and marketing will create an understanding of who your customers are and how to personalize their experience. Communication and collaboration are a must when refining personas to apply them to each area of your business.
Addressing these challenges and updating your strategies ensures that your buyer personas are effectively executed across your business, granting you a more successful marketing campaign.
The Future of Buyer Personas in Marketing
As technology advances, buyer personas will become the standard for a more sophisticated marketing strategy. While it may be overwhelming to determine demographics, psychographics, and behavioural personas in such a short time, future technology will have software in place to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently. This evolution will lead to targeted marketing campaigns that can anticipate customers' interests, lifestyles, and demographics before they are fully articulated.
With other technologies such as AI, machine learning, and virtual/augmented reality, these persona-driven insights can introduce immersive experiences that can influence digital marketing on a whole other level. These advancements offer a more dynamic, responsive approach to marketing by learning from ongoing customer interactions and behaviours. As algorithms change, and more social media platforms come to fruition, having the help of technology can ease the process of creating personas.
To create a successful marketing strategy, crafting multiple buyer personas will help personalize and target your ad campaigns to the right audience, resulting in higher conversion rates and future success. By understanding what a buyer persona is, learning who your customers are through outreach, where to implement them, and what the challenges and solutions are, you will be able to increase engagement in due time.
With the help of REM Web Solutions, we can utilize our expertise and innovative approach to reach your marketing goals. Contact us today to get started on creating a buyer persona for your business.
