Over the years, marketing as an industry has undergone a significant transformation, and it continues to evolve as the dynamics change each day. With the adoption of the internet and social media, the omnipresence of technology in all spheres of life has made the world a more connected place than ever.
In the past year, changes in consumer behaviour have occurred faster than expected. It is hard to keep up not to know who our customers are but to understand how they think, and it’s hard to keep up to their expectations many times.
Data-driven consumer targeting is crucial in identifying new avenues of growth, and new markets by knowing the right customer insights. Marketers need to create innovative products and attract prospects’ attention to inform decisions by understanding the actual prospects.
There has been a profound change in what people buy and how they consume it. The opportunity lies in driving more excellent value from the current consumers by engaging and associating more with them to stay longer.
If you think about it, we make many buying decisions every day without giving them much thought.
Hence it becomes more important why you should know your target first. It helps marketers and product owners understand what influences consumer buying decisions.
By understanding how consumers decide on a product, you can fill in the gap in the market and identify the product’s needs and create a solid Business Strategy.
Hence decoding the most talked about topic these days, ‘BUYER PERSONA.’
- What is a Buyer Persona?
- Importance of Buyer Persona in marketing, especially content marketing?
- How to gather data for Buyer Persona?
- What are the components of the Buyer Persona?
- Conclusion
If you are constantly struggling with understanding the psychology of why people buy and do what they do, then knowing who your target ‘Buyer Personas’ are is crucial as the more you know, the more you will connect with them.
‘You can’t always change your customer’s mindset, but you can always use their mindset to your advantage’- Philip Kotler.
What is a Buyer Persona?
In a straightforward explanation, ‘Buyer Persona’ is a blueprint for understanding your buyers, how to reach them, and how to convert prospects into customers. It defines your ideal customer and their motivation, thoughts, behaviour, pain points and goals, etc.
A well-defined ‘Buyer Persona’ includes demographic, psychographic, and behavioural information. Aligning audiences need to create insights about their goals that drive user preference for products & services.
As a marketer and media professional, before I begin on any of my work assignments, the only question I am always asking or beginning with is
- Who is my target audience?
- Where do they hang out?
- What motivates them?
- What do they like?
- Their choices, use?
- Their goals & Ambitions
- The consumer’s emotional, mental, and behaviour
And so many more questions? I want to understand it as it is an integral planning process of bringing the product and services to the marketplace.
While writing insights, you need to create a buyer persona to understand it better if you have nightmares.
For those who don’t know the importance of Buyer Persona efficacy in Content marketing
There is this little-known thing called Buyer persona-based content creation. But when you learn it and use it, you’ll see a massive difference in your successful product launch without worrying about copywriting and how fast you can generate the buyer-persona-based copywriting for higher conversion rates.
In any marketing effort, to truly succeed in content strategy, knowing ‘Buyer-Persona’ has become vital. It helps increase lead conversion rates by generating high-quality customized content consumed by your target audience. This way, you are not only engaging your prospect with a personalized message that they want to read and solve the problem, but you are also building credibility about what your company does and earning trust.
It’s not about suitable copy that generates higher conversion rates. Still, with the help of buyer-persona-based copywriting, one can generate high conversion rates and high customer retention.
Stop writing copy that doesn’t generate a strong emotional connection and leads to SaaS website failure.
This changes everything
Leaves with the pertinent question of how do I create a Buyer Persona and where do I begin or find data to build one?
Where do you find data to create your Buyer Persona?
Before you build an ideal Buyer Persona, comprehensive market research is needed. So, once you know what you must collect, you can learn more about your customers in various ways. It can be a combination of research, and past data, and if you are a newbie, you can try getting competition data defined for you. It is best to gather as much information as possible. Explained below are different ways to ensure your personas’ reliability.
- Available resources
- Market research
- Existing customer data
Available Resources
The secondary resources are primarily available as open resources, freely available for everyone’s use. You can find almost everything published, books, e-books and papers, blogs, etc. Third-party data is open to the public to show you how your ideal customers think and perceive. E.g., google trends data, etc. Hey, wait! Although this resource is free and important for initial understanding, here comes the problem, the data might be old and redundant. Inaccurate for the current days and may not answer the research question and hence a roadblock in the content creation while defining your ‘Buyer Persona.
Market Research
Market research offers excellent information to uncover audience patterns that can enrich the Buyer persona once you have collected data from the available resources. It’s time to validate those findings with Quantitative and Qualitative research to know the behaviour backed by numbers.
- Carry consumer interviews of prospects and existing customers
- Look at the current customer base and sales, and you will see a clear trend in the behaviour and personalities. Information collected from your resources is far more valuable
- The online and offline surveys conducted
- Research agency market research
A detailed consumer research analysis should reveal
- Demographic and Psychographic details
- How consumers’ associations (friends, family, media, etc.) influence their behaviour
- What consumers think and how they feel about other alternatives
- What influences consumers to choose between various options.
Though such research has its own limitations, to name a few, the sample size biases, expensive and time-consuming, the researcher’s skills, etc.
However, with the advent of AI in technology, many things have changed, even in market research. AI has augmented this field with data quality and logical interpretations. So, when you are generating insights from AI, it will be based on the fundamentals of copywriting a perfect and unique copy for your Buyer Persona.
Existing Database
Existing CRM and sales insights. Combine the same with an analytics report of your website, tool, CRM data, or any social media analytics data, and you will see a clear pattern emerging from all, which will define
Try to reduce the gaps by complementing the research with sales and analytical data. Once you have identified these groups, social data can elaborate your understanding by providing a more holistic view.
Once you have assembled all the data from different sources, you are almost ready to build your niche with a solid understanding of the potential customer base’s needs. This content will be more impactful with your niche to give strong results.
Creating a buyer persona – who are my customers?
(It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle, and you will love it as you mould it further.)
Details like age, gender, location, demographics, and psychographics are all critical, but so are their interests, other brands they like, publications they read, etc. The list is endless. The more you dig, the more connected you will be with your target group.
Key components of Buyer Persona
- Demographic – it’s a whole lot of criteria used to define ‘the people’ such as education, nationality, region, ethnicity, profession and position, marital status, etc. the more you write, the closer you get to your ideal prospect
- start with the basic information about who this person is?
- AGE …. GENDER…….ETHNICITY……etc.
- Professional – Education level, occupation, position, job title
- For the B2B persona, one must be specific to the B2B buying process. Like SAAS developer will be more concerned about technical value, but a SAAS founder will be more focused on the value they are going to derive from
- Level of income
- Family status
- Industry
- Psychographic – study based on consumer activities, interests, and opinions. This includes emotional responses, motivation, attitudes, biases, opinions, and standpoints (e.g., the US general election is a perfect example)
- Challenges – Knowing the customer’s pain point, the obstacles and fears, and what inhibitions are.
- What is the source of Information- to discover them, you need to find out what they do and spend their time on.
- Preferred books, blogs
- Preferred media
- Thought leaders following
- Barriers- What would slow down the adoption of the product or services
Compile all data together, and it’s also worth considering if the buyers and users are the same people at this point
Hence buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who embodies the characteristics of your best potential customers. Develop Customer Profiles basis on the points below and start visualizing a Face rather than an abstract.
- Personal factors: an individual’s interests and opinions can be influenced by demographics.
- Psychological factors: an individual’s response depends on their perceptions and attitudes.
- Social factors: family, friends, education level, social media, and income, all influence consumers’ behaviour.
- Audience journey – once we have identified who our Ideal Prospect is, the goal is to identify the value that buyer persona can provide to them in their journey.
Conclusion
Viola! Now you have your AVATAR ready to start with your content writing spree. Niche content can be a great tool for building a strong connection with your Buyer persona, which you just created. But with the changing meaning of loyalty in consumerism, the real driver is customer satisfaction. If they get their desired output, they stick to the brand. Solving the problems that customers face daily will resonate with them much better. So don’t forget to use the new technology of writing unique content using the NLP AI content generator.
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