Author Ann Handley said in her book “Everybody Writes” that quality content must have relentless empathy for the audience. Translating that to digital marketing, it means that you, as a marketer, must relentlessly focus on your customer, viewing the entire world through his or her eyes.
Your online advertising content and messaging should answer your customer’s wants and challenges during their whole journey to conversion. For that purpose, you must know who your customers are and what their journey looks like. The semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data is what we call “buyer persona”, and creating it can make the difference between success and failure in digital advertising.
A detailed buyer persona profile contains specific information about your targeted customers, such as who they are, their needs, their challenges, their desires, their social position, their financial condition, and what it requires to convert them to make a purchase. This information will help you determine where to focus your time, energy, and advertising dollars to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, sales, and customers to your business or organization.
Why Is Creating Buyer Personas a Key to Success?
Some of the benefits are:
- Because you make a better connection with your customers, you’ll be able to advertise in channels that your audience frequents most.
- Because of knowledge through buyer persona, it becomes easier to tailor message to audience. This knowledge will guide you in setting the tone of your ad copy, and will probably dictate the type of keywords you should be targeting, if using keyword search.
- Because of buyer personas, you can highlight certain features of a product, the features which are more important to your customers. Does your persona value convenience over price? Make sure your ads showcase it.
What Buyer Personas Should Include:
You can go as deep as you wish when creating buyer personas (usually the deeper, the better), however they should include at least demographic information (such as age, gender, family situation, location, education), professional details (industry, job title, company size), psychographics (such as values, interests, beliefs, motivations, priorities) and most importantly, clearly define what their challenges and pain points are (what keeps them up at night?).
Connecting the Buyer’s Persona to the Buyer’s Journey:
Your advertising messaging must relate to any stage of the buyer’s journey. Before signing up for a service or buying a product, a buyer generally goes through these three stages:
- Awareness: at this stage, customers first becomes aware of a need that they want to fulfill. They begin to research for solutions.
- Consideration/Intent: The buyer considers and evaluates a solution that can solve his/her problem or can meet his/her need. If you’ve done your marketing right, your company should be top of his/her mind at this stage.
- Decision: The buyer finally is ready to make a decision and purchases the product or service.
So now that you have both personas and their journeys, your job, as a digital advertiser, is to create strategies and tactics that move customers closer to the decision point by using channels and messaging that most align with who they are and where they are within their journey. Easier said than done, I know, but we can help you with that.
To learn more about how buyer personas can help improve your online marketing efforts and ROI, contact one of the qualified Marketing Professionals at MoreVisibility.
