Why Defining Buyer Persona Is Useful For Your Digital Strategy

Defining a buyer persona is a controversial subject in marketing. Some people think it’s just a story with inapplicable items, while some people find it helpful for better targeting.

I believe that it’s a necessary instrument for marketing, sales and customer support teams.

“72% of respondents stated they were using buyer personas for content marketing and messaging. 45% stated they used it to assess market challenges and problems, as well as to address overall marketing strategy”. “Consumer Think” noted in their recent study that they saw a close correlation between effectiveness of the buyer personas and the business goals.

Fundamentally, buyer personas should be a tool which brings insights about why and how the customers buy products or services.

Buyer Persona Template

1. Demographic data

Marketers have a ton of data to aggregate and to correlate for better targeting and to create a user persona template:

• Search your customer database, read conversations from the support team, and choose a real name for your persona with a real problem or need.
• Check the demographics at a micro-level from your Facebook page and look at the Facebook insights from your competition.
• Search your Twitter business profile and look at your brand ambassadors.

Complete the first section of the Buyer Persona Template with:

• Name
• Segment or industry
• Title or function
• Years in Job
• Reports to
• Age
• Education
• Type of persona: Buyer or User

How does the demographic data help you with your digital strategy?

Describing your buyer persona at a micro-level gives you a better perspective for targeting campaigns and writing positioning messages. Knowing the management hierarchy and who reports to who at your persona’s company helps you define who the decision maker is when buying the products or services.

2. Situation

Continue your Buyer Persona Template with:

• A typical day in the life of your buyer persona
• A typical interaction with your product
• A perfect day

A typical day in the life of your buyer persona.

This step helps you understand your customers’ worlds, what their unmet needs are, their problems, concerns, and joys. Before choosing your products or services, your customers have a full life with daily routines. Try to understand what apps they use, with what frequency they use those apps, what they are posting on their social media, and how they interact with your competition.

Understanding their daily lives and aspirations shapes your digital strategy and gives you a competitive advantage. It’s an easy task to understand your buyer persona’s everyday life, but today it is even easier with the help of monitoring apps for brands.

Social media is a goldmine today. You can easily track and get insights about your potential customers, the buying process, their interests, their feedback on your products or your competitor’s, and what they like or don’t like.

A typical interaction with your product

When do your customers search for your product?

Take a closer look at your customers’ daily lives and write real scenarios when the need occurs. What are they doing? Are they google-ing some specific keywords? Are looking for reviews on Facebook or Twitter? Are they asking their friends for help?

Answer these questions and describe a typical interaction with your product. Understand what the real problems are for your customers, when they occur in their daily lives and why they appear. Understanding the reason why people have these needs helps you target better and tweak your positioning.

A perfect day

Take a step back from your daily tasks and imagine what a perfect day looks like for your buyer persona. No issues, no problems, just a day when your customer enjoy his/her life, life at its fullest potential with no strings attached.

Understanding their inner world and what a unique, ideal world looks like for your buyer persona helps you create the story around your products or business. Create intangible value, not real features, and understand your buyer persona’s universe.

How does the demographic data help you with your digital strategy?

These three steps guide your marketing messages, and give insights about:

• The tone of voice you should use in communication
• What photos you should use in your digital campaigns
• What colors you should use in your social media messages
• Where you should first invest your marketing budget
• What other products your buyer personas are using and how they communicate

3. Three top of mind issues

Expand your universe and try to understand their deep concerns. Are your buyer personas concerned about their monthly reports to their managers? Or is a new meeting on the agenda that they feel unprepared for?

Your buyer persona’s life is more than ‘buy my product’ moments. Write down small data that makes a huge difference for targeting, messaging and positioning your products on social media.

How does the description of the issues help you with your digital strategy?

Choose the right partner for your digital campaigns. If your buyer persona is spending his/her time online on parenting Facebook pages or blogs, you could advertise on those pages or blogs.

4. What the buyer persona reads and how the buyer persona is rewarded

Complete your buyer persona template with what they read online and offline. Also include how they are motivated at work: compensation, bonus, commission, or other forms of recognition.

Final thoughts

Working as a marketer in a digital world is always a challenge.

Online marketing moves at the speed of light, and we should always be packed with the best tools and instruments for maximizing the ROI and improving the digital strategy.

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