Whether you are engaged in thought leadership, executing a content marketing strategy, or using social media to drive brand awareness, knowing your audience and maintaining a consistent message is essential to rising above other marketing noise. What’s the best way to accomplish this? Build a solid editorial mission statement grounded in your buyer personas.
In my experience, most small businesses lack both buyer personas and an editorial mission statement; so in this post, I am covering buyer personas. Check out my post on editorial mission statements to learn how to write your own and how these two marketing tools work together to create a robust content marketing strategy.
What is a Buyer Persona and Why Does Having Them Matter?
A buyer persona is a generalized representation of your ideal customer. Because buyer personas are going to guide your marketing activities, it is important that each persona is constructed from existing customer data or market research.
When marketers create personas, they usually create characters which represent the various categories of customers the business works with. It is not unusual for a business to have three to five personas; however, if you find yourself with more than five personas, you should look for commonalities between those personas and see if you can combine any of them.
Buyer personas answer the questions, 1) whom are you going to speak to; 2) why will they care, and 3) what can you say that is relevant to them. Without answers to these questions, it is far too easy to create content that doesn’t resonate with your audience. The process of creating buyer personas is a good exercise for your marketing efforts, too. As you create your personas, you will develop a better understanding of your customers, their pain points, and how your product or service addresses those pain points.
Key Elements of a Buyer Persona
Good buyer personas paint a picture of your ideal customer. It helps you understand what your customer is thinking, what motivates them, what their attitudes are toward your industry, and what would drive them to choose you over your competitors.
No matter your business, your buyer personas should contain the following information:
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Demographics[/one-fourth-first]
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Objectives & Goals[/one-fourth]
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Problems & Challenges[/one-fourth]
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Content Consumption Habits[/one-fourth]
Buyer Persona Pro Tip
[one-half-first]Far too often, I see buyer personas that include some gratuitous level of detail. Unless you are selling coffee, there’s no need to include if your persona like regular or decaf. Few businesses need to include the value of the persona’s house or their education level. If you do not have this information readily available, don’t worry about finding it to include in your personas. Instead, focus your time and energy on including information in your personas that helps you understand the buying motivations of your customers.[/one-half-first]
[one-half]Buyer Persona Pro-Tip: Unless you're selling coffee, there's no need to include your persona's coffee preference. Share on X[/one-half][clearfix]
Should B2C Businesses Have Buyer Personas?
Once thought to be the domain of B2B businesses, buyer personas are becoming increasingly important for businesses that sell directly to consumers. Consumers have more information than ever before at their fingertips, and for businesses to be ready to sell to a consumer precisely at their decision-making moment, or ZMOT as Google calls it, businesses must have a robust picture of who their customer is and what drives them to buy.
What To Do Next
Hopefully, you are feeling good about creating buyer personas for your business. I recommend heading over to my article on editorial mission statements to see how you can use your shiny new buyer personas to supercharge your marketing.
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