To understand core customer groups, it has become a standard for many companies to create buyer (or customer) personas. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized characters that build a picture of your ideal and largest markets.
They usually encompass not only demographic information like age, location and income, but also psychographic information like interests, reasons for buying and concerns.
In this post, we'll learn how to build buyer personas for your online business so you can laser target your ads and create more compelling content that will engage your ideal customers.
Why Are Buyer Personas Important
What was once an exercise generally only practiced by large companies, is becoming increasingly useful for smaller online retailers. There are a few reasons for this. First, as the online space becomes more and more crowded, it’s becoming increasingly important to have ultra targeted ads and communications. Additionally, the tools to target customers has been democratized to the point that everyone can create campaigns to target customers based on a ever-growing list of demographics and psychographics.
Personas Will Evolve And Change
It's important to remember that your personas will change as you discover more information about your major types of customers and what motivates them. Especially when you're first starting out and creating personas for a brand new business, much of you customer personas will likely be based on personal thoughts, feelings and hunches. However, as your business progresses and you makes sales, you will start learning a lot more about your core customers.
As you learn more, don't forget to go back and continually re-define your buyer personas to ensure you're targeting your potential customers most effectively.
Broadly Define Your Personas
To begin defining your buyer personas, you'll want to start by being as broad as possible, then drilling down into more specifics. Keep in mind that most businesses will have multiple buyer personas.
Drilling Down Into Persona Details
So where do you start when it comes to defining your customer personas? There’s a lot of possible information you could research, use and define, however, a great place to start is by looking at what information you can practically use. Facebook is one of the fastest growing ad networks and it’s also one of the easiest to use. Most importantly, it also has a lot of targeting options that go hand in hand with your customer persona. This makes Facebook Ad’s a great place to start to look for customer persona demographics and psychographics to define.
We've listed some of the major elements to define below for each of your personas:
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Location - Where do people from this persona live?
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Excluding Location - Where do people from this persona not live?
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Age - What is the age range of this persona?
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Gender - What is the gender of people in this persona?
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Interests - What are the interests of people in this persona?
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Education Level - What is the education level of this persona?
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Job Title - What field of work do your customer work in and what types of job titles do they carry?
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Income Level - What is the income range of this buyer persona?
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Relationship Status - What is the relationship status of this buyer persona?
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Language - What languages do people in this persona speak?
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Favorite Websites - Why type of websites do people in this persona frequent?
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Buying Motivation - What is this personas reasons for buying your product?
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Buying Concerns - What is this personas concerns when buying your product?
Keep in mind that you don't need to answer all of these questions about each of your personas and you may opt to answer different questions altogether. However, the purpose should always be to understand your customers more to be able to communicate more effectively, as well as to be able to target your ads more precisely.