A Guide to Understanding Buyer Personas for Digital Marketing

A profitable digital marketing campaign is built around customers’ needs while providing relevant information and solutions that resonate with their problems. Here is where buyer personas come into the picture. Being a crucial part of the SEO marketing strategy for eCommerce businesses, buyer personas allow you to improve your connections with your target audience. This further defines your online brand presence and hone your identity. Creating buyer personas is one of the best ways to generate effective and relevant outcomes and plan promotional campaigns to enhance audience engagement.

It does make sense! If you do not identify your audience and play in the blind, you will not be able to hit the bullseye. Similarly, if you do not know what your potential customers need, what they think, and what will lead them to make a purchase decision, how will you achieve KPIs and revenue targets?

According to Mark Schaefer, three to four buyer personas usually account for over 90% of an eCommerce company’s sales. And it is evident to create your buyer personas if you are looking forward to increasing your audience, enhancing brand awareness, and boosting conversions soon. Especially with the holiday season being around the corner, it is imperative to go for target-based, personalized marketing rather than going all in. For that, let’s understand what are buyer personas and how to use them.

What are Buyer Personas?

In a nutshell, ‘buyer personas are profiles representing your potent customers’ whereabouts’. These profiles enable you to tailor your marketing efforts to connect with your target audience and meet their needs with the perfect blend of solutions. Typically, a buyer persona is based on profound research and includes characteristics of an ideal customer, like the challenges they face and distinctive factors that determine and affect their buying behavior.

Usually, businesses prefer to have multiple buyer personas. For instance, while making a purchase, each person involved in finalizing the purchase is a separate identity or persona. Everyone has different criteria to evaluate different products and services, and it is your job to assess strategies to address those needs.

Also called marketing or customer personas, they are used interchangeably with buyer personas. These help the business owners understand their customers and empathize with their feelings, coincide with their needs, and increase customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention.

Why are buyer personas important?

In this super digitized era, creating buyer personas has significant benefits that cannot be overlooked. Digital marketers can run focussed and targeted ad campaigns to cater to specific needs, behaviors, and queries of potential customers. This is always better than aiming blind. No business owners want their resources, time, and efforts to go waste because of vague and unfocussed marketing strategies resulting in poor quarterly statements.

Businesses distribute their content using search engines and other social platforms, and over time, potential customers notice your products and services and develop considerable interest. This is how you sell. But companies who do not specifically cater to their target audience end up wasting time,, efforts, and marketing budget in rendering content to uninterested users. This is a wasteful expenditure and leads to unsuccessful marketing campaigns.

Buyer personas ensure that all activities rendered via a marketing campaign leads to acquiring and serving customers that are tailored to the targetted buyer’s requirements. But it is not as simple as it sounds. It is no rocket science either. By paying ample attention to the way people make decisions, developing a virtually ideal marketing campaign is possible.

When a customer chooses a product or a service, it is human nature to gravitate towards a brand that they know and trust. And the best way to build trust among your customer base is to display a genuine concern for them and their needs. The process should be subtle but crucial. The first step to approaching a potential customer is to understand their pain points and address them. Then and only then they will be open to learning what you have to offer.

In this case, creating buyer personas and using them as a guiding light for your digital marketing campaigns can help you keep the needs of the customers on the center stage.

What is the use of Buyer Personas?

Firstly, the process of creating buyer personas is explicating in itself. It involves asking in-depth questions, paying attention to customer journey stages, following every navigational move, and learn about each hotspot and action. This will allow noticing pain points that you hadn’t before. It also gives you a chance to unearth inconsistencies in personal perspectives leading to resolving them.

So, the first imperative use of generating buyer personas is to help you gain customer insights and facilitate cross-departmental alignment. This will leave the marketing, sales, product development, and customer service in one line believing in the view of your ideal customer.

Next, these buyer personas can help you guide in the following ways:

Building Product Roadmaps

The product development team can leverage the buyer personas to identify and prioritize changes in the products. This will help cater to them efficiently. Which customer wouldn’t want a product solving all their problems in one go?

Building Digital Marketing Strategies

The marketing team can always have the upper hand in building effective digital strategies if they know the audience better. Hence, buyer personas help the team during both strategizing and executing marketing campaigns, even when the personas are critical. Also, these consumer personas can help in the identification, planning, and prioritization of various promotional activities.

Crafting Promotional Campaigns

Another way to use buyer personas is through social media advertising and email marketing to target a potential customers base. If you know your ideal consumer profile, you can run more focused ads on social media and save on resources while increasing the probability of getting more CTRs.

For email marketing campaigns, you can create segmentation lists using buyer personas for seasonal and personalized targeting. Make sure on using a feature-rich email marketing platform like Klaviyo to send targeted emails hassle-free. Knowing the preferences, interests, and choices of your audience helps you in attracting customers and retaining them.

Enhance SEO

This is probably the best and most efficient way to use buyer personas. SEO serves as the backbone of any digital marketing strategy by fulfilling a business with needed visibility, traffic, and ranking. The buyer personas facilitate keyword research and also come in handy while drafting copy. It also helps create problem-solution content for businesses while enhancing SEO.

Improve PPC

PPC or pay-per-click is very crucial for increasing your brand presence, visibility, and conversions using paid advertisement. It is of utmost importance for lead generation too. Buyer personas help businesses achieve their goals by running ad campaigns with targeted messages and formats to reach out to various types of potential customers.

Enhancing Content Marketing

This is the last one on our list but certainly an important one. If the content is the king in this digital era, marketing is queen, and only a strategic alliance between the two can yield desired results. You can leverage the buyer personas to generate authentic, unique, informative, and relevant content to attract your consumer base. When you have a clear picture of an ideal customer in mind, you will generate hard-hitting and relevant content that gets consumed effectively.

How to create a buyer persona?

Buyer personas are the combined result of internal and external research. Also, as mentioned earlier, the majority of businesses need to create multiple buyer personas to cater to distinctive needs. But all this and more can be gradual. A staggered start should be preferable, and you should let the personas evolve with time.

Start with something you already know. Build a persona based on you and your team’s inputs and experiences. Then make a plan and stick to it to enhance the persona with more research. You can start by creating a list of questions, like questions related to age, sex, professional info, interests and hobbies, and other relevant demographic questions.

There isn’t a defined list of universally recognized buyer personas to choose from but on a broad level, types of buyer personas can be defined as:

Decisive buyers
Consensus seekers
Skeptical minds
Social butterflies
Analytical shoppers
Fickle & innovative clan

To better understand the mentioned types of personas, check out this informative piece by RAIN Group. Buyer personas aren’t limited to this list and could be different for each business. It is obvious that you would not be able to make a full-proof list either and no list can fit all, just like every human is different, every customer is different too.

After ample research, following numerous consumer journeys, and segregating gathered data, you would be able to create your first buyer persona. You can later talk to real customers and enhance your findings. Ask them to fill out surveys.

Buyer personas are not static but dynamic documents. They evolve as your experience grows and you learn more about your customers. So, although it is no rocket science, it is a time-taking process, and businesses must be patient and willing to gather new insights along the way.

Conclusion

Buyer personas are crucial for an eCommerce business at every step of the way, for product developers, content creators, SEO experts, digital marketers, and even business owners. Without a clear understanding of your customer base, there is a high probability that your efforts and resources might go in vain. Therefore, to stand apart from your competitors, it is evident for you and everyone on your team to understand the complex nature of your customers. Also, work towards delivering to fulfill their needs and preferences, whether it is the product or content. To know more about eCommerce digital marketing strategies, and more interesting articles, please visit our website.

Buyer PersonasDigital Marketing Strategyecommerce digital strategy

Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.

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