Why you need buyer personas

If you’ve worked with us before, you might have noticed we are obsessed with customer personas. They are a brilliant resource when creating any and all content.  From paid campaigns to blogs to user journeys.

By knowing about your ideal customer you’re in a stronger position to design your brand identity. This informs everything from the colours you use, to tone of voice, your digital focus and so much more.

What information do you need, any why?

You’re building a person. You’ll want to have a think not only about how to interact with your potential customers (e.g. where they hang out online) but the kind of language to use.

The more you know, the easier it is to help. Have a think about the kinds of topics that your customers (and leads) ask you about. This will also help inform your wider content strategy.

Creating your persona

Some of these points will be more or less relevant depending on whether you’re a B2B marketer, or in consumer goods.

What you need:

• Age group, assumptions on their life stage. (This may be more relevant for consumer goods, where you’ll need to be in tune with their personal needs, such as holidays, children, property etc.)
• Their location (this will inform content distribution)
• What’s their professional experience and role (this will help influence what they know/and don’t)
• What are they interested in?
• What are their pain points (especially interested in the ones you can solve)
• Where they spend their time online

Also think about:

• How they engage with you: do they prefer a phone call, emails or meeting up (hey, remember when that was a thing?)
• What motivates them to buy? (is up-skilling their team a priority, or making their own life easier and workload lighter)
• How do they research/how did they find you?
• What pain points do you solve?
• Where are their knowledge gaps, or what are the kinds of questions they ask?
• What makes them tick
• Are they a decision maker or influencer in the buying process?
• What turns them off? (too much/not enough information, jargon etc.)

So, is it just made up or does data inform persona creation?

There are three main sources:

Your actual customers and what you notice about them

• Google Analytics
• Social media insights
• You can also use social listening tools, but that’s not necessarily an essential tool here.

Here are some examples of what insights you can look at:

#1 Facebook

Facebook allows you to look at age, gender, location and language. This data is available for your fans, followers, people in your reach and those who have engaged.

The two areas we recommend focussing on are your fans and people engaged. While there will be some crossover, engaged people may not already be fans (or not yet accepted an invite).

#2 LinkedIn

If you have a LinkedIn business page, the insights show: job function, seniority, industry, company size and location. It’s simple but relevant to the platform.

#3 Google Analytics

You can delve into your website visitors demographics using Google Analytics. There’s a wealth of data in this platform, but some basic areas at a glance:

• age
• gender
• interests
• industry
• life stages

If I’m already familiar with this information, why do I need to create a document??

Great question. It’s all well and good knowing this, but what about your team and if you work with any consultants or an agency? Having a persona document not only helps keep everyone in the loop, but it’s an efficient way to do so.

We recommend adding your personas to your brand guide and strategy documents. But it's also handy to have when working with other teams, internal or external. They’re great for briefing anything design and content related, and for setting up ads.

A non-exhaustive list for when personas are useful:

• Helping others understand your brands tone of voice
• Designing (and refreshing) your brand identity
• Informing content strategy
• Training your sales team
• Planning events (well… when that side of life returns!)
• Planning ads (digital and offline)
• Which marketing channels to focus on
• Checking in on performance: are you resonating with your persona?

Short on time?

With all the will in the world, sometimes we simply don’t have the capacity to get things done. We appreciate creating a thorough and effective persona can be time consuming. Whatever the your next big project is, if you’re considering working with an agency, we can factor in persona creation too.

If you’re thinking about your next steps, but aren’t sure where to begin or don’t have the resources, get in touch with us to discuss next steps. We offer consulting as well as buyer persona workshops.