In a day and age that finds consumers increasingly unreceptive to traditional advertising methods, it’s no longer enough to simply create catch-all ads aimed at everyone and hope for the best. <\/p>\n
Modern marketers know the key to digital-age success is incredible content that not only offers a consumer value but feels as if it was created especially for them.<\/p>\n
In order to do this well, you need to really know <\/em>your target audience, and a set of well-crafted buyer personas<\/a> can help. <\/p>\n But to be genuinely effective and keep you ahead of the curve, yours need to be spot on. <\/strong><\/p>\n Here’s a closer look at how you can create eerily accurate buyer personas to help you nail your marketing goals and fatten up your bottom line.<\/p>\n One of the better ways to create scarily accurate buyer personas on an ongoing basis is to plan your data gathering methods with those personas in mind. <\/p>\n For instance, give some consideration to the fields you include when creating forms for your website and landing pages.<\/p>\n Don’t go overboard and ask for too much information at one time<\/strong>, but do <\/em>consider what information would be most helpful when creating or updating your buyer personas. <\/p>\n Think basic demographic information like age, gender, and profession. Many marketers also consider it beneficial to ask about a consumer’s social media use.<\/p>\n Another great way to collect valuable data for accurate buyer personas is to create and distribute fun interactive content options like personality quizzes<\/a>. <\/p>\n Quizzes give you opportunities to ask questions that are a bit more unusual, as well as to collect more data than people might have the patience to enter when filling out a standard form.<\/p>\n Yet another way to gain terrific insight into the minds of your customers is to sit down with members of your sales and customer service teams. <\/p>\n They spend the majority of their time interacting directly with your target audience <\/strong>and are in a unique position to clue you in as to what they care about.<\/p>\n Have these team members noticed any common threads that connect all or most of your customers to one another? <\/p>\n What issues, pain points<\/a>, wants, and needs do your customers have that might be going unaddressed? <\/p>\n Use what you find out to add nuance and detail to your buyer personas for better results in future campaigns.<\/p>\n It\u2019s wild how much gold you can dig up from these internal chats. Sometimes it\u2019s a phrase that keeps popping up\u2014maybe three different customer service folks mention how often buyers complain about hidden costs or unclear setup instructions. Don\u2019t be too quick to dismiss \u201clittle complaints\u201d either. They pile up and signal a root need or frustration that isn\u2019t obvious just from numbers in a spreadsheet. If your sales team keeps running into the same hesitations or objections, you want that info shaping your personas (otherwise, you end up shouting into the void).<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a tendency to silo off this kind of anecdotal feedback, maybe hesitating to record anything as \u201cdata\u201d if it doesn\u2019t have a pie chart behind it. But that’s missing the point. The funniest thing is: Often, the nitty-gritty stories your frontline staff remember end up matching up with hard data down the line. Listen first, dissect later. Treat your service and sales folks as the eyes and ears of your audience\u2014they\u2019re living it day by day, not just checking metrics once a quarter.<\/p>\n Creating accurate buyer personas is all about getting the essential details right, so make sure you ask the right buyer persona questions<\/a> when brainstorming yours. <\/p>\n Here’s a closer look at the essential categories to include and some sample questions to get your thought process started in the right direction.<\/p>\n This is broad information about which demographics the represented consumer occupies. <\/p>\n How old are they? Are they married, and do they have children? How many? Where do they live? Are they educated and to what extent?<\/p>\n Although people are more than just their jobs, what they do for a living is nevertheless a huge influence on their thinking and decision-making methods. <\/p>\n What are the consumer’s job title and role? How big is their company, and what industry is it in? What skills are required, and what does a typical day on the job look like?<\/p>\n Everyone has both personal and professional aspirations, challenges, dreams, and goals. <\/p>\n What do those look like for the consumer behind each persona? What solutions has the person already explored to help them get where they’d like to be in life? What (if anything) has prevented them from resolving key pain points and challenges in their life?<\/p>\n It’s impossible to create accurate buyer personas without including information about shopping preferences and consumer behavior<\/a>. <\/p>\n How does the person go about researching products and services to buy? How do they prefer to interact with sales reps and vendors when necessary (phone, email, etc.)? What factors influence a decision to buy a product or not?<\/p>\n Some companies use many different primary and secondary buyer personas when brainstorming their marketing campaigns, especially when those companies are very large or maintain extensive, varied product catalogs. <\/p>\n And you may decide you want to do something similar with your own collection of buyer personas at some point down the line, but focus on perfecting three or four primary personas first.<\/p>\n Secondary personas<\/a> generally represent people you’re less likely to come in contact with during the process of nurturing a sales prospect. <\/p>\n On the other hand, primary personas represent vital players you’ll work closely with.<\/strong> <\/p>\n These are people responsible for initiating, advocating for, and perhaps even finalizing the end purchase, so they’re the most important people to understand.<\/p>\n Creating accurate buyer personas to represent the customers you most want to target is only part of the process of building a great collection of personas to fuel your marketing efforts. <\/p>\n It’s just as crucial to know who you don’t <\/em>want to market to because they’re a bad fit for your product or maybe even your company<\/strong>, in general.<\/p>\n Tap into the minds of these consumers, as well, by creating negative buyer personas<\/a>. <\/p>\n Consumers represented by negative buyer personas are individuals who likely engage with your content but don’t convert. <\/p>\n Or sometimes they do <\/em>convert but yield low returns on your original marketing investment or otherwise turn out to be problematic customers.<\/p>\n Detailed negative personas can help you better distribute your marketing funds and plan your future campaigns<\/strong> so that you reach an audience that’s genuinely right for your products and services.<\/p>\n As any experienced marketer can tell you, nothing about marketing stays the same forever. <\/p>\n Technologies, social media platforms, and go-to strategies rise in popularity and fall out of fashion again.<\/p>\n Consumer tastes change and evolve alongside economic shifts, political occurrences, and various social trends.<\/p>\n That said, creating accurate buyer personas isn’t something you do just once.<\/strong><\/p>\n2. Plan your input forms with buyer personas in mind<\/h2>\n
3. Don’t forget to talk to your sales and customer care teams<\/h2>\n
4. Ask the right questions when creating new personas<\/h2>\n
Personal Basics<\/h3>\n
Professional Life<\/h3>\n
Goals and Challenges<\/h3>\n
Buyer Behavior<\/h3>\n
5. Focus on finetuning primary personas<\/h2>\n
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6. Understand who not to target<\/h2>\n
7. Update all of your buyer personas regularly<\/h2>\n