8 min read
In this article I will be discussing the concept, research and creation of buyer persona or customer Avatar. This article would be helping to people’s who had just started their career in digital marketing as this forms an important pillar of Digital marketing or Internet marketing
The first key element that comes in our mind when thinking of digital marketing is ‘whom are we going to sell?’ To have any kind to marketing to be successful, we need to have a source and a recipient. Here source is your business and the recipient is the buyers or consumers.
What is a Buyer Persona definition?
A buyer persona is a complete representation of someone who represents your target audience. This is not a real person, but a fictional person who fits the characteristics of your best potential customer.
You will give this persona some name, demographic details, interests and behavioral traits. You need to understand their goals, objectives, pain points and their buying patterns. This will allow you to craft marketing messages targeted specifically to them. Your buyer persona is the one for which you will develop your products for, and will be your brand voice to the social channels you use.
As different groups of peoples may buy your products for different reasons, you need to have more than one buyer persona. You can create different customer or buyer persona based on each segment of your customer base. Buyer personas keep you concentrated on expressing customer priorities instead of your own. Think about your buyer persona when you are making any social media strategies
Since buyer persona is based on real data, therefore there is lesser chances that the desired transactional goal will fail. Your new campaign should address the needs and goals of at least one of your personas. Your strategies should be based on that your personas meet their goals.
A better marketer is the one who can communicate well with their audience. If you cannot communicate 1:1, then you won’t be able to communicate well 1: many.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the
product or services fits him and sell itself.—–Peter Drucker
The Anatomy of Buyer Persona
If you want be successful in creating your buyer persona, you need to be asking yourself these categories of questions
- Who is he/she?
- What is his/her goals?
- What is the problem, he/she is facing in achieving his/her goals?
The two factors that can help you to define your target customer:
- Demographic, which consists of age, sex, location, occupation, relationship status
- Psychographics, which consists of goals, objectives, challenges, values, likes, dislikes, interests, etc.
The 6 step process of creating Buyer Persona
Step 1: Niche
Selecting the right niche is the most important thing you need to do even before identifying your buyer persona. You can do keyword research to identify your niche and for that you can use tools like Google auto-suggest, Ubersuggest, Google keyword planner, answerthepublic.com etc. to identify medium to low competition keyword and will give you some idea about what your buyers are searching on internet.
Step 2: Survey
Once your niche is selected you can collect some information about what your target buyer are asking or searching on internet. You can create some list of questions that includes demographics and psychographics kind of questions. Once your presentable set of questions are ready, you can use some of the survey tools like Google forms and Survey Monkey.
Step 3: Collecting the data
Once you have created the survey form, the next step is to share it with your friends, family, customers, individually or share it on social media. You can also call, email or text or approach someone gently and politely, and asking them for their valuable feedback.
This is going to take some time but the result is going to be very helpful in understanding your buyer persona
Step 4: Analyzing the data
Once the data is collected you can easily find out or identify your buyer persona. You need to focus on majorities, while analyzing the data. The analysis of the data will give you an idea of what are the key characteristics, features and traits of your customer.
Based on you feedback make the list of people who matches your buyer persona, and these list of people are your ideal and potential buyers.
Step 5: Interviewing the best matched Buyer Persona
Once you have shortlisted the candidate, call or send him/her a thank you message, and inform then that they are the one whom you are eager to serve or help in getting from their current state to their desired state.
Request them to give 5-10 minutes of their valuable time and try to connect with them deeply by asking them questions related to their challenges, fears, passion, and goals. This will help in building trust with you customer and they will take you seriously as trust is the most important element of digital marketing.
Step 6. Adding Visuals or Sketches to represent your Buyer Persona
Now that you have collected data, interviewed the candidate, which is closer to your ideal persona, the next step is to ask for the permission from the interviewed candidate to provide his/her picture or you can draw his/her sketch.
Now paste the picture or sketch on your buyers persona list of characteristics of your buyer.
Congratulation, your buyers persona example is finally ready
How I created My Buyer Persona
In this research I have chosen my niche as “ Affiliate marketing where I will help people in 9-5 jobs to build up their own affiliate marking business by selling them courses related to it ,which would help them in smooth transiting from their job to their own online affiliate marketing business. This will be for busy professional between the age group of 25-55+ years”. So, I have prepared a survey form with Google forms and forwarded it to my friend and old colleagues with request message.
Upon studying the data, I found a pattern with everyone’s responses, with some of the screenshot attached below
Based on these results that I have listed the traits common to larger section of audience. Based on these results that I have listed the traits common to larger section of audiences
Age—-25-29 yrs
Occupation—- Job employee
Location—- A metropolitan city in India
Educational Qualification—- Undergraduate
Willing to spend on online program per year—-up to 5000 per month
Highest annual income group—-1-4 lakh INR
Willing to invest in online business building program—- 75% but provided that the program has good track record and genuine.
After interviewing and gathering the data through this survey I can finally draw the biodata or outline of my buyer’s persona and place a picture or sketch of his.
- Lucky Singh is a 25-30 years old mnc employee from Delhi.
- Has a bachelor’s degree
- His aim is to smooth transit from his soul sucking 9-5 job to his own online business.
- His earning at present is just enough to run his family, but he is desperate to have another source of income as well.
- He is aware of online coaching programs and is willing to give it a try but, his only concern is that it should have a good track record and should be genuine.
So what are the learnings out of this?
Doing our research well is the key determinant for any successful marketing campaign. Rather than the product you should focus on buyer persona first, so that you are able to identify pain points and goals of your buyers. It will help in developing your products and services from the buyer’s point of view. The product that you develop should fit the customer, so well that it should sell itself.
If you do your research well and built the right buyer persona, then you have your product built on the real data pillars, where chances of failure of your products are very rare.
. . . . . . .
