Creating a Buyer Persona for Your Target Digital Audience

When it comes to developing an effective digital marketing campaign, the single most important step one can take is that of knowing their customer.  Who is the person that purchases your product or service? Once this question has been answered, the strategy for reaching your customer can be designed, tested and implemented.

When we ask the question of “who?” we’re not simply talking about a demographic description such as gender, age, and occupation,  but rather a more personal description of your buyer’s likes, dislikes, their motivations, and behaviors. In other words, it is a Psychographic description of your buyer.

Understanding the psyche of your customer will enable you to develop a specific persona of that buyer that will help to sharpen your digital marketing strategy in the following ways:

• Stay focused on your customer’s needs and wants
• Develop content that supports these needs and wants
• Enable you to develop a website that offers a positive user experience
• Tailor and personalize e-mail marketing campaigns
• Enable you to see issues from your customer’s perspective and offer solutions

So now we’ve established the importance of asking the question of “who” and how that shapes our strategy.  Now, let’s take a look at various methods that can be used to gather the necessary information.

What is a buyer persona?

According to an article written by Dave Chaffey, a buyer persona is basically a fictional character that represents your target audience. In developing a digital strategy, here is a practical framework for segmenting your audience that can help create a buyer persona.

Demographic

Define your audience based on age, gender, education, occupation, and in the case of B2B, company size, and position.

Psychographic

Wants, needs, goals, motivations, tasks.

Web Usage

This should inform you on issues such as experience, are they new to the web or experienced; location, do they use the web at home or work and the platform they use, desktop, laptop, mobile or tablet as well as social media sites they may use.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another tool for gathering information about your target audience and one that we rely upon regularly here at lodestar marketing group. We rely specifically on Traffic Sources and Behavior in GA in order to help us strategize for our clients.

If you have an online presence but are not taking full advantage of the GA account that is available to you there are a number of “how-to” resources online that can teach you how to navigate this site. Part of what we do here at lodestar is to help our new and existing clients better understand and make use of this valuable tool.

Focus Groups

Another means of gathering customer information is through the use of Focus Groups.  We recently had the opportunity to gather customer information in this way for one of our clients. Admittedly, this can be a difficult means of getting your information simply because it’s time-consuming for both the business and the customer.

However, it does enable a business to literally see and interact with their customer and observe behaviors and reactions to questions that are asked of the group.

Surveys

Customer surveys are an extremely effective tool in gathering information about your customer because it comes directly from your customer.  Taking a few moments to interview your customer (either via phone or online survey)  about why they use your brand, what they love about your brand and what you can do to improve your brand can offer keen insights that will help you to better target your message as well as optimize your site.

The important piece of customer surveys is the actual implementation of the information.  We find this to be a very common tale with new and sometimes existing clients. Gathering the information is one thing;  gathering it and implementing the data to better target your ads or optimize your site is another. We find this to be an area where we can step in and help.

We can help clients analyze the data compiled from customer surveys and then help them develop more targeted display ads that can improve their click through rate, or optimize their site’s content yielding a higher SEO ranking.

The Takeaway

The most important takeaway is this: by taking the time to know who your buyer is, you will have a much more cost-efficient and successful digital campaign that will impact your SEO, Display Ads, web content and ultimately your PPC. All of these pieces work together in a digital strategy to drive traffic to your site and deliver increased revenue to your business.

If you’d like more information on how we can help you understand your customer and better target your digital campaigns, give us a call.