How to build buyer personas for better marketing

When marketing your business, it’s important to consider your audience. Thinking about your target audience will help you reach the right people for your products or services. One way to improve this is by creating buyer personas for your marketing strategy. But if you’re not familiar with this process, you may wonder how to get started. 

This guide will discuss how to build buyer personas for better marketing: 

• What are buyer personas?
• Why are buyer personas important?
• How can you build buyer personas?

If you want to know how to build buyer personas for better marketing, you’ll need to know what they are. Buyer personas are profiles of fictional people that represent your target customer or audience. These profiles help you understand how to best market your business. 

You may get buyer personas mixed up with ideal customer profiles, and though they can be similar, they’re not the same. Ideal customer profiles are typically created for brand to brand (B2B) marketing, while buyer personas can focus on brand to brand and brand to customer (B2C). 

Buyer personas are more individual or specific, while customer profiles have wider targets. You may have several buyer personas, each focusing on a different aspect of your business or audience. Meanwhile, ideal customer profiles focus more on ideal company clients than individuals. 

Still, both profiles help you determine who your marketing should target, who to reach out to for leads, and who the faces are behind company clients. 

Knowing how to build buyer personas is valuable to effective marketing since general marketing isn’t enough today. With so many brands and people, you need to target your approach to reach the right audience. 

Buyer personas help tailor your brand towards the best buyers for your business. In fact, buyer personas can increase the effectiveness of your business website by 2-5 times. 

If you consider the details and personality of your target audience, you can understand their habits and where to find them. Then, you can create better content that speaks to them. Not only will you be able to access the right people, but they will be able to find you. As a result, you can build the strongest client base for your business. 

So, if you want to know how to build buyer personas for better marketing, there are a few steps to creating your own.

The first step in building your buyer personas is to research your market and target audience to understand who your business is for. To do this, 

• Look at your current client base for trends and patterns. 
• Compile analytics of your customer base to see who you typically work with. 
• Examine your strongest clients, or those who most fit your ideal client. 

Next, look at your referrals or leads. Which ones are you the most promising? This list can also show you what type of people you can help the most. Finally, look at competitors and social media platforms to see who’s relevant to your audience and their digital habits.

With detailed research on these people and their consumer behaviour, you can start to build your buyer personas. 

Part of how to build buyer personas for better marketing is considering how many buyer personas you will make and how you’ll organise them. You’ll likely want to make a few personas, separated by industry or job. This system will help you understand the different yet specific personas you should go after. 

Once you decide how many personas you’ll make and how you’ll separate them, you can build your buyer personas. First, give each buyer persona a name and outline essential details about who they are. You’ll want to be as specific as possible. 

Here are a few things you can ask yourself: 

• Name 
• Age 
• Appearance
• Job title
• Income 
• Location 
• Family status 
• Hobbies 

Try to come up with as much information about this person as possible, using your research as support. The fictional character can help you more if they feel like a real, well-rounded person. So, when writing these personas, set aside enough time to do it justice. 

Once you outline your personas, you can go a bit deeper to consider their key personality traits and motivations when it comes to daily life or purchasing behaviour. Also, think about each persona’s challenges or pain points that your business can solve. Again, try to be as detailed as possible and get creative to establish a complete picture. 

With a clear picture of each persona, you can outline some conversation ideas or tips for pitching to these personas. This information can help you approach sales meetings looking prepared and professional and consider how you’ll reach them with marketing. 

With these buyer personas, you can customise your messaging on your website, social media, and adverts towards these people. Research shows that behaviourally targeted ads are twice as effective. So, if you craft your messaging, you can increase your marketing memorability and catch the right audience’s eye. 

Think about adverts you’ve seen that seem to be talking directly to you. They may have asked a question, brought out a relevant thought, or joked about a unique situation. Try taking this approach using your buyer personas. IIf you keep your perfect customer’s unique needs and pain points in mind, you can attract that customer and grow your business. 

As you reach more people and grow your client base using buyer personas, you can earn more money for your business. But, financial management can be stressful and time-consuming when you’re self-employed. That’s why thousands of business owners use the Countingup app to make their financial admin easier. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation, invoicing on the go, receipt capture tools, tax estimates, and cash flow insights, you can confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

Find out more here.