In today’s data-driven world, personalization is crucial to capturing the attention of your audience. From the user experience to content marketing and beyond, the way your brand interacts and communicates needs to meet the needs of your audience. But first, it’s important to know who your audience is.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona (or customer persona) is a fictional profile that represents your typical or target customer, based on market research. Well-crafted buyer personas allow you to personalize your marketing efforts at scale by grouping your customer base by similar attributes. Because personas mirror your real-life customers, they can be used to help your company better understand your customers’ needs, expectations, voice, preferred method of communication, and more.
Creating Your Buyer Persona
Your buyer personas will be unique to your business and organizational goals. Analyze your customer data, website analytics, social media followers, etc., to start to get a better picture of the type of person your business attracts. A good persona should be as detailed as possible, while generalizing who your audience is. Your buyer personas should include:
- Basic demographics (i.e., gender, age location, etc.)
- Job title, education level, roles and responsibilities
- Family type and household income
- Budget
- Goals and pain points
Consider the following customer persona example described by Nike’s chief digital officer Adam Sussman. Nike’s “Weekend Runner” is a 30-year-old woman training for a half marathon in a couple months. She uses the Nike Run Club app, so the company has a great amount of data on her running and achievements. The Weekend Runner looks to Nike for encouragement and advice. Nike uses this persona along with the data from the app to recommend shoe products to the runner based on her mileage and running habits. Using personas like the “Weekend Runner,” Nike can adapt to the wants and needs of this specific segment and communicate in a way that makes sense at this point in the customer’s journey.
Persona-Driven Marketing
Persona-driven marketing is becoming increasingly necessary to achieve success. Well-crafted personas help build the understanding of what your customers want from you and how they want to hear it. Creating these different segments will allow you to develop different tones, voices, and marketing tactics to ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. After all, you wouldn’t use the same inbound marketing approach for an engineer as you would for a small business owner.
Whether you’re looking to create a targeted email campaign or increase your social media engagement, personas can help you meet your key performance indicators (KPIs). According to Aberdeen Research, marketers who use personas and map content to the buyer’s journey typically receive 73 percent higher conversions than companies who don’t take this approach.
A digital marketing agency can help take your efforts one step further. When you partner with Aztek, we take the time to find the right tone and voice for your brand and tailor our solutions to your business’s unique goals and objectives. Contact us today to start a conversation about how we can help drive leads, sales, and awareness for your organization.
