When it comes to creating a marketing strategy, having the best plan is absolutely crucial. And when it comes to having the right plan, one of the best places to start is identifying your buyer persona. In this post, we will be looking in more detail at what a buyer persona means and why it’s such a fundamentally important tool.
Persona Based Markrting
A buyer persona is essentially a fictional biography that describes the ideal person who is intended for your product or service.
If you have done any background reading on the subject of marketing and digital marketing, then there is a good chance that you will be familiar with the concept of targeting. Targeting means ensuring that you know precisely who you are aiming your marketing at – who is most likely to buy your product or service – and then making sure that everything you do is tailored to that audience and even that it is designed in such a way that that audience will be the people most likely to encounter said marketing.
For instance then, if you were going to sell wedding dresses, then you would need to target your ads and your marketing messages to someone that would be most likely to buy the dresses off of you. And who would that be? It would be engaged women!
Now if you were to start a PPC campaign through something like Facebook Ads, you could make the conscious decision to target that audience.
Facebook allows you to do this by deciding precisely which users will have your ads show up on their homefeeds. Facebook lets you choose your audience based on their age, their sex, their location, their hobbies and interests, their marital status, their income and more. So if you were selling wedding dresses, you could ensure that your ads would only show on accounts belonging to engaged women local to your store. And if your wedding dresses were Disney themed, then you could have the ads show only to people who list ‘Disney’ as one of their interests!
Now you aren’t potentially wasting any money by showing your ads to people who definitely won’t be interested (married men!).
The Buyer Persona
The buyer persona takes this one step further by fully profiling the individual you’re likely to be selling to. So if you’re selling a piece of training equipment, you might ask who this is for.
That person might be someone who is into working out. But is it a piece of equipment for intense bodybuilders? Or for busy young professionals interested in staying in shape?
If it is the latter, then what else can you ascertain about that individual? Perhaps that they are professional, maybe that they care about their appearance, maybe that they’re likely to have disposable income.
