One of the fundamentals of inbound marketing that a business owner should have in mind when trying to execute a successful content marketing strategy is
Buyer Personas. What are Buyer Personas? Imagine you’re an animator and your next project is to create a comical character based on a real-time figure. Beforehand, you would already have a picture of what you want the comical character to look like in respect to the figure and you’ll try as much as possible to create your character to represent the figure. This is exactly how Business Personas work.
Your Buyer Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customers. This representation is based on their demographics, behavioural patterns, consumer preferences, motivations, and goals. Buyer Personas help you determine the kind of content to curate on social media that will engage your buyers and in turn generate leads. When you create personas, you discover what delivery approach you should take for your content.
Here are some ways of creating an accurate business persona:
Do Active Research The Traditional Way
Through one-on-one interviews and focus groups, you can easily understand your persona’s goals, behaviours, and motivations. You should interview contacts that are directly or indirectly involved with your business. These could include current customers, former customers, prospects and coworkers. Although these interviews and focus groups may be quite expensive for the small business owner, they provide you with the insightful knowledge you need for your Buyer Persona.
Consult Your Customer Service Team
Customer service teams are one of the most reliable sources to turn to when building a Buyer Persona because they interface with your current customers on a regular basis. You can have your sales and marketing team present persona workshops based on their one-on-one interactions and conversations with your customers. This will help you know what to expect from prospective buyers.
Identify Trends
You can create more than one Buyer Persona to help you make deductive reasoning and know what obtains on a general scale. With multiple personas at your disposal, you will be able to find commonalities and similarities between them which will likely more accurate and generally applicable. This, however, may not be possible with just one persona.
Create Persona Profile Stories
Creating profile stories of your personas will help you have a wealth of reliable information about them at your disposal. These profiles should include information about your personas’ background, demographics, goals, challenges, job details, main sources of information, buzzwords and mannerisms, and so on. You can also include quotes taken during interviews to represent your personas and make it easier to understand them.
These are the ways in which you can go about building Buyer Personas. However, these are not hard and fast rules; you should also go with your intuition. If you observe a trend in a customer that does not likely fit your business objectives, you can always tweak your persona to fit this trend.
