Sophie is 35 years old. She’s just been promoted to Marketing Manager at the Tech company she works for. She learned the ropes in a Marketing Assistant role and her seniors expect a lot from her position. Her first order of business: improving the effectiveness of the company’s marketing.
Here’s the catch, Sophie isn’t a real person. She’s a buyer persona – a representation of an ideal buyer.
With consumers exposed to as many as 5,000 marketing messages every day, creating user personas help businesses break through the clutter and capture attention with relevant content. It humanises your customers and paints the picture of an individual buyer, identifying their problems and values.
Apple’s success story
Apple effectively uses buyer personas for its different products. Check out their persona focus technique in this iPad 2 advertisement:
Now watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTFPB4OUqrM
The first features the user scrolling stocks and investment portfolios, capturing the business professionals’ attention. Suddenly, they can see how this product would fit into their work life and visualise themselves using it in their day-to- day business needs. The second shows an adrenaline junkie preparing to take on the torrential rain with his iPhone 7. Creating this persona attracts the outdoorsy types and demonstrates the waterproof features of the new device.
How to create buyer personas
Creating the profile is probably the most important stage in the process – get the wrong persona and you’re marketing to a completely different audience, not to mention wasting your time and efforts. Here’s a couple of steps to consider to get you started when creating your buyer persona:
1. Establish the basics
Segment your target group and ideal buyer by gender, age, job title and role responsibilities. Identifying these basics will give you a strong starting point of who you are targeting.
2. Learn from example
When you create a persona, you are creating an example of your ideal consumer. From this example, you can identify your consumer needs, objectives and potential obstacles. Doing this also gives insight into how your buyers view your products and services. Use this information wisely to improve your offerings.
3. Study, study, study!
To do this study their needs, concerns, frustrations, urgency to buy and ability to buy. This helps to develop and tailor content that appeals to your target audience, resulting in greater leads and sales.
If you need help creating your buyer persona, drop us a note at [email protected] – we can help you to tap into your target market!