Establishing Buyer Personas – The Essential Element for Successful Online Selling
One of the easiest ways to build an effective Internet marketing business is to create marketing strategies using online content targeted to specific buyer personas.
Without a focus on the buyer, the typical marketing program is built on what the organization wants to say rather than what the buyer wants to hear.
What are Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer or group of people based on market research and real data about your existing customers.
Buyer personas will provide valuable structure and insight for your small business. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across your organization.
As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
Companies that are the most successful with direct-to-consumer selling, implement marketing strategies for their buyers.
The blogs that are the best at reaching an organizational goal are the ones that are not written about companies or products, but rather customers and their problems.
Your goal should be to segment buyer personas so you can develop marketing programs to reach each one.
Creating a Buyer Persona
For each buyer persona profile, you will want to know as much as you can about each group of people.
You will want to know:
- What are their goals and aspirations?
- What are the problems they are facing?
- What words or phrases did the buyers use to find you?
- How can we reach them – I.E. Social Media, Blogging?
- What media do they rely on for answers to their problems?
When creating your buyer personas, consider including your customer demographics, their behavior patterns, motivations and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.
The best way to learn about buyers behaviors for developing your buyer persona profiles are to interview people.
Through conducting interviews with your buyers, you should be able to identify what their problem has been and how your product or service will or has helped solve their issue.
You should know the media that your buyer turned to for answers. Example: did they use the search engine as their first step? If so, what words or phrases did they enter?
OR, did the buyer find you through a social media source, etc?
Finding buyer phrases for your small business requires you do some keyword research. Although interviewing buyers about the problems they face and listening to the words and phrases they use is best.
Today’s Social Media Marketing
Everybody at this point realizes that in order to be successful in today’s web-based, Internet world, social media is on the first page of your marketing menu.
“With social selling, you’re no longer simply pushing information about products and services out to your audience. Instead, you’re discovering what they’re passionate about, which can lead naturally—organically—into a discussion of how you can solve a problem or improve their lives, and why your company is the right choice to help them,” says Jon Ferrara CEO of Nimble
In order to strategize for your social media marketing campaign you will need to identify your ideal customer via your buyer persona, then create content to reach each buyer group.
At this stage, you must think like a publisher and develop a plan to reach your buyers with focused content in the media they prefer.
Closing Comments About Buyer Personas
When you stop talking about you, your products or services and instead use the web to educate and inform important types of buyers, you will find that your success will increase ten-fold.
