If you pay special attention to how businesses market their products or services in Facebook & Instagram advertising campaigns. You will find out that most businesses will focus on hard selling instead of effectively fulfilling customer needs.
Hence, before running a digital marketing campaign, it is important to have a clear picture of the potential customers.
Buyer personas are a crucial element of an effective inbound marketing strategy as businesses have to cut ahead of the competition and break through the social media noise.
I will be sharing the guide on how businesses can improve their digital marketing ROI by creating an effective buyer persona to address the consumer needs.
What Is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona would be a researched-based fictional profile of the target audience or ideal client. The main objective is to have a clear picture of who you are marketing to?
Business owners or marketers can develop compelling content with a detailed buyer persona, which would speak the challenges and goals faced by the targeted customers and eventually motivate them to take action.
For instance, the customer support team is able to improve the customer shopping experience by using the buyer personas to reduce frustration when the products are not working as they know the customer betters before assisting them.
Creating the right buyer personas might seem like a complicated and time-consuming process for solopreneurs and small business owners. However, they do not have to build the entire process flow of the buyer personas at once, be patient with the process.
How are buyer personas used in digital marketing?
The process of creating a compelling persona for businesses begin with simple research; here are a few great questions marketers should ask to get them started:
- Are the potential customers married or single?
- Are they the final decision maker?
- Do they have any specific hobbies?
- What is the age range of the potential customers?
Businesses will need to build brand trust by developing content to address potential customers’ problems or challenges.
– Content Marketing
Content marketing holds a prominent place in digital marketing as modern consumers demand a unique experience. Therefore, businesses must develop emotional content to attract their attention with the help of a detailed buyer persona.
The more businesses communicate with their potential customers, the easier it is to build brand trust, and they can also rank high on high search traffic keywords.
– Paid Ads
Businesses spend a large amount of their revenue on paid ads. This is where they should direct the paid ads only to the potential customers interested in the products or services offered with the help of the data generated from the buyer personas.
– Social Media
For example: if the targeted audience is interested in cooking, marketers can post about that regularly on Instagram to boost organic engagement rates.
With the help of the buyer persona’s, marketers can launch social media paid ads visible only to people in a specific geographical region interested in that product or service.
Take a good example of a fitness membership app, ClassPass; their marketer’s make good use on the pain points of not finding a flexible fitness membership that can access any classes offered by different studios as the basis of their Facebook Ad.
Case study
Let’s take a look at a company that sells ergonomic office chairs. The potential customers would be those who sit on their chairs and work for long hours throughout the day. People who are working as software engineers are perfect examples.
The company can hire a copywriter to produce helpful content on why it is essential to use ergonomic chairs with the help of the customer profile data generated from the buyer persona.
People who see such highly targeted and engaging content will be curious to explore more as they address a problem they face. Therefore, such digital marketing campaigns will always produce better results and improve the return of ad spend (ROAS).
Why are buyer personas so important to your business?
The buyer personas help make sure the digital ads are displayed only to the people who show an interest in the content offered by the company. On the other hand, companies that do not focus on buyer personas would run generalized digital marketing campaigns, where content is promoted to a general audience.
This would be a waste of the marketing budget as not all people will buy what the company offers. For example, an athlete would not want to invest money to purchase vitamins that can make him walk better, as it is useless.
How to Create Buyer Personas for Better Digital Marketing Campaign
Now you have a good understanding of the importance of buyer personas. Here are some of the effective methods you can follow to create such for the next campaign.
Identify the pain points of your customer
The very first thing marketers should do is to identify the pain points of the customers. This is where they should understand the personality of the potential customers, such as age, gender, income, and spending habits.
Follow by understanding work-related questions of the potential customers, such as their workplace, career goals, biggest fears, or pain points. Businesses can survey the existing customers by using the CRM system to gather helpful information. Alternatively, they can also go ahead with one-on-one interviews.
Commonly questions they should find out; What is keeping them from making a purchase? Are they caught up in their work till they do not have a chance to even think about the attractive offers provided by the company? Whatever the difficulties faced by the potential customers, this is the section to list them out.
Pro tip: Marketers can get some valuable details by taking a look at the data from the Google Analytics account.
Identify the customer goals
Understanding the goals of the prospect is an essential process in designing the buyer persona. For example, maybe the prospects are looking for methods to prepare a nice dinner for the family in a short time, or they are looking for ways to reduce the house chores time by half?
When marketers know the customers’ goals, they can deliver a more personalized, helpful shopping experience by designing the company offers to resonate with them.
Understand how the products and services can help customer
When businesses are aware of this, they can promote that unique selling point of the product or services through digital marketing campaigns and showcase how it can address challenges.
For example, suppose your business offers a standing desk. In that case, you can imagine how the ideal customers would buy those tables for their office as it will help them maintain proper posture and get rid of back pain.
Conclusion
You have a good understanding of the reasons why a business should use buyer personas. Keep these important suggestions in mind and continue to optimize the process of creating a good buyer persona and incorporate them into digital marketing channels.
The better marketers can understand what the potential customers want and the psychological factors that influence behavior, the better they can motivate them to complete the purchase.
