The most fundamental of any marketing effort is understanding the audience you’re targeting, otherwise known as your target audience. Most small businesses have a fairly good grasp of who their target audience is. Some have taken the effort of diving deeper and describing their ideal client. To get the most out of your marketing efforts, it’s a good idea to create buyer personas so you know how to effectively craft your marketing message to different individuals. Understanding buyer personas and why you need them for marketing can help elevate your overall buying efforts.
A buyer persona is a generalized representation of your client that accounts for the demographics, behaviors, goals, motivators, and challenges they are facing. Buyer personas provide structure and context for your small business to better understand the needs of individual customers. By creating buyer personas, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business. In other words, buyer personas help you understand your customers and prospective customers better, which makes it easier for you to tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to meet the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of the members of your target audience. Since different groups of people may buy your products for different reasons, you might need to create more than one buyer persona. You can’t get to know every customer or prospect individually. But you can create a customer persona to represent each segment of your customer base.
There are a lot of tools that can help you build your buyer persona(s). HubSpot and Hootsuite both offer free templates to help guide you through the process, or you can follow these simple steps.
The best place to research buyer personas is to start with people who have already bought from your company. Get a mix of personal and professional information such as:
Once you have this information, look for commonalities. Look for desirable traits that are better suited to how your company solves problems, communicates, or otherwise functions. Keep diving deeper and deeper until you can actually envision a person with the ideal persona best suited for you. For example, you may find that the majority of the decision-makers you work with are female, between the ages of 35 and 50, prefer email communication and work with a budget of $10,000/month. You might also determine that most of your good clients seem to use your services because it solves a very specific problem, such as a lack of incoming quality leads. You can begin to imagine an actual person that has all these traits and needs. With that information, you can craft marketing messages aimed specifically at that person. Most companies, if they’ve done any research, craft their messages based on the ideal client, but with this additional insight, your marketing message now becomes more targeted, more personal, more aligned with the needs of the actual decision-maker instead of the company as a whole.
Buyer personas help you understand your customers and, more importantly, how your product or service best suits them. More importantly, your messaging becomes more personal based on the persona, so you’ll substantially increase the likelihood of your marketing messages hitting home and resonating with the desired person. Even creating one buyer persona to start can help elevate the quality of your leads!
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